On her website, Orlean describes the kind of writer she always dreamed of being: "someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events." Her deep curiosity and compassion for her subjects are evident in every piece she writes. Her subjects are often people with a similar deep connection to something. In an interview with Oprah.com, Orlean said, "I think I'm often drawn, whether I realize it or not, to the idea of what drives people. What do we love?" In Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Orlean tells us that her fascination with her subject began with a figurine of the hero dog that her grandfather clearly felt was special and would not let his grandchildren play with. In her research for the book, she discovered many other people who were invested in Rin Tin Tin. The original animal died, but his memory lived on in his offspring and in other movie and television productions. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Orlean said, "The power of memory is one of the important themes in the book. My memory of Rin Tin Tin, and in particular my memory of that figurine, and the persistence of those memories, were essential to my interest in the subject. As I learned more about Rin Tin Tin's history, the mystery of my grandfather's attachment to that figurine suddenly seemed to reveal itself, and since it tracked such an important part of history, it became a natural theme for the book." To Orlean, then, living forever means living on in someone's memory.
In interviews with Oprah.com and with her publisher, Simon & Schuster, Orlean mentioned that both her father and a loved dog died as she was writing Rin Tin Tin, making very real for her the consideration of loss and memory. She told the interview for Oprah.com, "What has always fascinated me and what's very emotional to me is the question of what lasts. People want to, if not live forever, have evidence of their existence live forever. And I think that part of what happened for me was that my dad died in the course of my writing this, and I started thinking about memory, the idea that things come and go and then they're gone and forgotten. But Rin Tin Tin, by being reinvented over and over in people's imaginations, became kind of a timeless model: He just keeps going and going; his story outlives everybody. I feel great tenderness toward the people who devoted themselves to Rin Tin Tin and his history because I think everybody wants to have had their existence noted by the universe." We want our lives to have mattered.
In writing about Rin Tin Tin's life and legend, Orlean learned a profound lesson about how to live. Writers write biographies and memoirs in order for the lives of their subjects and their own lives to have been noted by the universe. Orlean says near the end of Rin Tin Tin, "I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life--some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be so durable. The lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or the future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient."
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
