The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  Q: Has a subject ever fallen in love with you?

  A: Yes. And I felt great affection for him, but I understood what was going on. Let me explain transference to you. I knew he was confusing the circumstance with the specific emotion. He was in love with the sense of attention and interest, real attention and curiosity. It is a great feeling to have someone who simply wants to know everything about you but isn’t demanding in return. It is like therapy. I was flattered but I also knew it is contextual. You do have a sort of magical power when you write about people. I sometimes forget what it means when you write a story and have it published in The New Yorker and 800,000 people read it.

  I often write about people who don’t get written about. They are not press-savvy, they are not used to this. To them it is usually a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I never go with a set of questions. I will sit and wait and listen and watch. I take notes. The intimacy that I develop with people makes the end of the process sometimes very jarring. I have come to terms with the fact that people feel, if not betrayed, then kind of shocked after spending two or three weeks with me and having a sense of closeness.

  I remember the hardest thing for me was when I did a piece about a ten-year-old boy. When I was done with the reporting I was under a lot of deadline pressure, so I told him that I had to go and write the piece.

  And he said to me, “Are you going to come over tomorrow?”

  And I replied, “Of course I am not going to come over tomorrow. I am on deadline.” Then I thought: I have spent two weeks with this kid saying, “Whatever you want to do I want to do; whatever you have to say I am interested in.” It is not that it was false, it was just that I had moved on to the next part of the process, writing my story. For him, it was very abrupt and very confusing. For an adult it is easier to understand, but for a kid, attention and friendship equals attention and friendship.

  Q: Have you ever been smitten by a subject?

  A: Yes. He was a show dog. I fell in love with him. But he was a tough interview.

  Tim McHenry edited and contributed to the Bloomsbury publication The Lost Voices of World War I. His travel writing on Madagascar, Borneo and East Timor has appeared in The Daily Telegraphy London.

  Reading Group Questions

  and Topics for Discussion

  1. Is there a hero in The Orchid Thief? An anti-hero?

  2. Is the book subjective? Objective? Or a different genre altogether? Some people describe this as “literary non-fiction.” Is that how you would characterize it?

  3. Susan Orlean resists the temptation to feel possessed by the orchids but she is willing to undergo great trials in order to satisfy her passion for reporting. Is this passion evident in her writing?

  4. The passion for collecting is described in the book as a means of infusing meaning into life, subjecting the vicissitudes to some order, acquiring the ability to mold and change the nature of things, i.e. create life itself. What other means do humans employ to achieve the same ends, and how effective are they?

  5. John Laroche would not describe himself as an orchid person. To him the orchid is a temporary albeit very intense passion, a means to an end, not an end in itself. How would you analyze the difference between Laroche’s motives in collecting orchids and the regular orchid collectors we visit in the course of the book?

  6. Laroche wrestles verbally with the thought that acting within what he considered the bounds of the law for his own immediate gain was ultimately an act of altruism. His rape of the Fakahatchee would force the law to be changed and close the loophole that allowed him to poach rare and wild orchids from an Indian reservation in the first place, thus protecting the species in the wild, and securing it for the marketplace at the same time. Is this the thought process of an amoral character? Or is he just an everyday charlatan? Discuss.

  7. Laroche makes a very telling statement: “When I had my own nursery I sometimes felt like all the people swarming around were going to eat me alive. I felt like they were that gigantic parasitic plant and I was the dying host tree.” Is Laroche playing the role of the victim, the martyr to a (preferably lost, but grand) cause or is he in control of his life by making a living off other people’s weaknesses, whether it be a passion for orchids or pornography? Discuss.

  8. Orlean seems fascinated by the story of Darwin and the study of the orchid with the eighteen inch nectary and the moth with the eighteen inch proboscis to feed on it: the idea that two totally different life forms evolved specifically to serve each other; that neither could have existed without the other. What has the evidence of the orchid’s adaptability altered your perception of the theories of evolution?

  9. Orlean interrupts her central narrative of John Laroche with stories of the orchid hunters of the past, the contemporary state of Florida and other histories. How does this affect the pace of the work? Is the framework she has devised successful?

  10. The Native Americans on the reservation are entitled by one law to remove protected species from their land. Is this law justified?

  11. Orlean seems surprised by the abundance of sexual references to orchids in her book. Yet the flower is the prime sexual organ of most plants. Seek out a florist with a good representation of orchids. What alternative descriptions of these exotic flowers can you devise?

  12. What is the real core, the central character, of the book: Laroche? Florida? Orchids? Native Americans? Darwin? Orlean?

  13. As a reader, what did you expect from a book about orchids? How did your experience of reading The Orchid Thief compare to what you expected?

  14. The working title of The Orchid Thief was “Passion.” What does that suggest about the themes in the book?

  15. What, besides orchids, could generate a book like this? Are there other subcultures or other objects of desire that might be as provocative?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992 and has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. She graduated from the University of Michigan and worked as a reporter in Portland, Oregon, and Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in New York City.