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Journalist Susan Orlean Has No Regrets About her Delightful, Drunken Tweetstorm

July 19, 2020

For the unfamiliar, Susan Orlean is a 64-year-old longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, which was adapted by Charlie Kaufman into the movie, Adaption, wherein Meryl Streep was nominated for playing Susan Orlean (the movie is less an adaptation of The Book Thief and more a movie about Charlie Kaufman (played by Nic Cage) adapting The Orchid Thief).

The point is: Susan Orlean is someone who can believably be played by Meryl Streep. She's lovely, and had backyard chickens long before many of us decided to raise our own during the pandemic. On Friday night, Susan Orlean drank too much wine, got trashed, and took to Twitter.

But here's the fantastic twist about Susan Orlean's drunk tweets: There was nothing at all offensive about them. She didn't say anything inappropriate. There were typos all over the place, but otherwise, Susan Orlean could wake up on Saturday morning with a hangover, but with no regret about her tweets. How refreshing!

What happened is this: A neighbor had a new colt; she went over to visit; she drank too much wine; she came home, ate a taco, got in bed while the rest of her family watched a movie, and she wanted some candy. Here's a sampling:

That's most of the best tweets, but if you want to hear the entire night's worth, here you go!

The best thing about the drunken tweets is that she had no regrets the next day. No one got cancelled, she did not have to call her publicist to help her out of a jam, and she did not have to apologize to anyone, except fennel seeds.

In fact, she spoke to the Los Angeles Times yesterday, where she admitted that the entire drunken rant, including the typos, was genuine (none of it was performance art), and she wasn't embarrassed by it:

I was laughing. I didn't think, "Oh my god, I can't believe I said that!" There was nothing horrible -- it was loony, it was goofy, the only person who might've looked crazy was me. Social media is like yelling into a mountain valley. If you choose to treat it this way, it's almost like notes to yourself and it just happens to be broadcast. So I wasn't mortified. I just thought: "I was so drunk!"And when I read it, I was baffled: At what point did I remember I'd made yogurt that morning?! I guess I went out to the kitchen. I must have.

And no: She does not have a drinking problem: "I'm just a social drinker," she told the Times. "If this were a regular practice, I'd need help. But I also think getting drunk occasionally is not the end of the world."

Amen. This is the way that Twitter should be used. The only possible downside? Potentially becoming besties with Kathy Griffin.

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