If you’ve ever read a Susan Orlean book — “The Orchid Thief,” “ Rin Tin Tin” or “ The Library Book,” say — and didn’t want it to end, here’s good news. There’s more. Her memoir, “Joyride,” a chronicle of her career in narrative nonfiction, shares the backstory and process of each of her books in edifying detail.

From the title on out, “Joyride” acknowledges the great fortune that Orlean has had in knowing exactly what she wanted to do with her life from an early age and the pleasure she has derived from realizing it, while convincingly conveying the vast amount of work she has put in along the way. The message is not just to follow your bliss, but to follow your bliss with every resource you have, every erg of energy, every mote of passion and every ounce of confidence you can muster.

Confidence, the nonfiction writer says, is the “single essential element in good writing.” Well, maybe: Having as much raw talent as Susan Orlean is also useful. Modestly, she leaves that thought to the reader. Orlean’s self-presentation sheds light on the difference between confidence and ego.

She opens the book with an account of her process in writing “The American Man at Age Ten” for Esquire in the early 1990s, showing us why this adorable piece — they wanted Macaulay Culkin, she gave them an ordinary kid from New Jersey — is her most anthologized.

She then goes back to the beginning, with family snapshots and diary excerpts accompanying loving portraits of her parents, who sound so charming it’s a surprise to read, “I assume there was a spell when my parents enjoyed each other’s company, but that was before my time.” While “Joyride” is more a professional memoir than a personal one, her own miserable first marriage and happier second one are candidly discussed, too, with a funny detour between them with a Bhutanese tour guide.

By the time she was in college, Orlean knew she wanted to “write factual stories with as much wit and audacity and inventiveness as I associated with fiction.”

Orlean knew she wanted to write for the New Yorker. And she took dead aim, beginning at alternative newsweeklies in Portland, Oregon, and Boston, selling a cover story on cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to the Village Voice, moving on to Vogue and Rolling Stone.

In developing the concept for her first book, “Saturday Night,” she crystallizes the process that will become her signature: “I would voyage through an idea. I would take a frame and place it around a wide variety of circumstances and people and settings.”

There are many highlights: The great good fun of “The Orchid Thief” becoming the Oscar-winning movie “Adaptation” is one of them. “Watching Meryl Streep, projected on a nine-foot screen, say ‘I’m Susan Orlean’ was an out-of-body experience,” she writes.

You’ll feel it, too. This down-to-earth leviathan invites you to sit right next to her on her joyride, and even imagine you might take your own version.

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Joyride

By: Susan Orlean.

Publisher: Avid Reader Press, 353 pages.

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