What do You think about The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People (2002)?
This collection of short non-fiction essays by Susan Orlean (of the Orchid Thief) showcases some of the best New Yorker style writing around. The first essay, "The American Man, Age 10" is worth the price of admission. Here's the first paragraph:If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would ' wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would not be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn't have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement - probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song ("Here Comes the Rain Again") over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin's dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.
—JohnS
tSusan Orlean’s collection of essays explores a whole host of topics ranging from surfer girls in Maui to high school basketball stars to a female bullfighter from Spain. Each essay is a personality profile highlighting the unique and fascinating aspects of each person and their deeds. Orlean focuses many of her essays on people that wouldn’t ordinarily end up in a personality profile such as real estate agents and grade school children. However, each essay shines and points out the humorous along with the extraordinary details of each central character. Her use of the essay form also adds to the accessibility of her writing. Each profile is a clean and intense look at an entire person, and Orlean is able to reveal such a large quantity of information to her readers in relatively few pages.
—Katherine
"As far as magazine journalists go, I’m a big fan of the witty and hyper-aware Susan Orlean. Her 1999 piece on famously awful girl group The Shaggs is one of my all time faves, a beautifully observed look at misplaced hopes and dreams. That and several other quirky profiles (most of which were originally published in The New Yorker throughout the ’90s) are assembled in Bullfighter. For the most part, the articles are fun and interesting and not too terribly dated. I could see all of them working perfectly as magazine pieces (well, maybe not so much the surprisingly boring one about the African king who moonlights as a taxi driver), but reading them all together makes Orlean’s self-awareness annoyingly apparent. Still, there are a few precious gems here. I remember reading the book’s sharp and offbeat profile of ’80s teen queen Tiffany in Rolling Stone way back when, and her description of Tiffany’s face alone has stayed with me for some odd reason — 20 years later! I also enjoyed her profiles of a young woman who works as the sole reporter at a small town newspaper, another woman who runs a store that only sells buttons, and Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers. And don’t forget that Shaggs piece — all of which make this book worth tracking down a cheap used copy for." - Scrubbles.net review, January 4, 2009.
—Matt
