Susan Orlean on the New Jersey Tiger Queen
‘Orchid Thief’ author Susan Orlean joins this episode of TNA to talk about the weird stories she loves to pursue, from a New Jersey Tiger Queen and an orchid thief to show dogs.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Did you know that there was a female version of the Tiger King in New Jersey? Most people wouldn’t, but stories like these are the kind that Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean loves.
Happenings and creatures that are just in the margins or that are, for lack of a more eloquent term, weird. It makes sense, given that Orlean’s book is about a man who stole orchids. But she has an affinity for animals, too.
“I wrote this piece about a woman in New Jersey who had 27 pet tigers,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. No, it was not “Tiger King” but it was similar. “This was an incident that took place in New Jersey probably 15 years ago in the middle of the suburban town in New Jersey.”
Then there are show dogs, which she has also written about.
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“Talking about your kid comes with all sorts of complications. I mean, if you’re bragging about how smart your kid is, you look like a jerk. But if you talk about the fact that you got this dog and it’s unbelievable, you were able to train it to sit and lay down, it’s a subject that people find interesting,” she says.
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In fact, animals are basically an antidote to the divisiveness the country is facing right now.
Hear her out: “I think this period of time is so weird in this way where you don’t dare ask someone if they’re vaccinated or not, because you feel like if they’re not, you don’t want to get into a whole thing about why they’re not vaccinated,” she says, referencing a situation where she wanted to connect with her new neighbors but feared they were anti-vaxxers.
“We talked about the dogs,” she said.
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