Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about metaphors from Susan Orlean…
I’ve been a fan of Susan Orlean for many years.
But with the publication of her aptly-named memoir, Joyride, I’ve become a bone fide superfan.
I loved every moment of reading this book. It’s filled with terrific advice for writers and tantalizing details about her life. But most of all, it is filled with her rich and exuberant writing.
Here are my favourite examples of figurative language from her latest gift to the reading world:
- The first morning of my reporting, when I showed up at the Duffy’s house in Glen Ridge, Colin’s indifference seemed to have hardened into something more obdurate. More plainly: he shunned me. Perhaps the oddness of the situation — that an adult woman would be tailing him for two weeks — had sunk in. After a sullen breakfast we walked to school and I trailed him by several feet as if I were a geisha meekly following my master.
- Instead I got a job waiting tables at a mid-range, cheerful seafood restaurant in Portland, where the kitchen ceilings were freckled with grease from the spattering skillets of fried clams.
- Being a writer is an entrepreneurial undertaking and you are the product, the management, the publicity department, the stock boy, the jobber, the racker, and the janitor.
- Believing you are a writer is mind over matter, an act of sheer confidence. It’s like balancing a huge stack of plates on your head, and the minute someone suggests you can’t really balance that many plates, you quaver and drop them.
- When David finished his call, I peered over the partition and asked what he’d been talking about. He said that The New Yorker was looking for new Talk of the Town writers. This was shocking. It was as if the Vatican had put a listing for cardinals on Craigslist.
- Stories don’t conclude but they do have consequence. They are documents of our humanity, shimmering trails of time spent alive.
I loved this book. If you’re a writer, I bet you will, too.
[Photo credit: Cropped image ©2018 Larry D. Moore, Creative Commons]
