Interview: Author Susan Orlean on her life with the iPad

Susan Orlean has become a geek, something that simultaneously amuses and mildly horrifies her. Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, and is known for her richly detailed features about places and people. Orlean’s focus is often on individuals outside the public eye, whom she dissects in the gentlest of ways to reveal what makes them tick. Her book The Orchid Thief, looking at how orchid collecting and cultivation leads people to odd acts, was made into the quirky film “Adaptation.”

Lately, however, Orlean has been tearing up the techie side of things. The writer, who lives with her husband and 5-year-old son (and 10 chickens) in the Hudson Valley in New York, has amassed 70,000 followers on Twitter, and writes regular blog entries for The New Yorker.

Orlean used Twitter to document her anticipation of a 3G iPad, and its ultimate arrival. As a part of our “Living with iPad” feature story in the September 2010 print issue of Macworld, we caught up with her a month after she’d received her 64 GB model. She is currently at work on a biography of dog movie star Rin Tin Tin.

(The interview has been edited for length, including questions being condensed for clarity and brevity.)

I can’t really picture you with a laptop out trudging through the swamps and bogs in Florida. What was your setup before this last few weeks?