Susan Orlean - The Bullfighter Checks Her Make-Up

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First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by William Heinemann

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Susan Orlean has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Music Sales Corporation for permission to reprint the following: excerpt from Things I Wonder by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright 1967 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP); excerpt from Who Are Parents? by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright 1968 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP); excerpt from Philosophy of the World by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright 1969 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP). All rights administered worldwide by Music Sales Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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C ONTENTS

L A M ATADORA R EVISA
S U M AQUILLAJE /
(T HE B ULL F IGHTER C HECKS H ER M AKEUP )

For John Gillespie
who makes me so happy

THE BULLFIGHTER CHECKS HER MAKE-UP

Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and Saturday Night. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her articles have also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue and Esquire. She lives in New York City.

Arresting [the reader] reads on, transfixed by the casual grace and beauty of these miniatures The profiles have a timeless quality
San Francisco Chronicle

Orlean has enthusiastically, humorously and quite honestly portrayed these characters in all their glory and with all their warts, and the level of devotion to doing so comes through in every sentence What marks her work is her ability to enter a given persons life and stay in it long enough to make readers feel theyve known the character all their lives
Boston Globe

Engrossing compelling. Reading Bullfighter will leave you convinced that the world is much wider and stranger than you had thought and that the most ordinary-seeming people are often the most remarkable
US Weekly

ALSO BY SUSAN ORLEAN

The Orchid Thief

Saturday Night

I NTRODUCTION

I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A WRITER. IN FACT , as far as I can recall, I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer. In junior high school I took a career guidance test that suggested I would do well as either an army officer or a forest ranger but I didnt care: I wanted only to be a writer, even though I didnt know how you went about becoming one, especially the kind of writer I wanted to be. I didnt want to be a newspaper reporter, because I have never cared about knowing something first, and I didnt want to write only about things that were considered important and newsworthy; I wanted to write about things that intrigued me, and to write about them in a way that would surprise readers who might not have expected to find these things intriguing. During college I kept a journal with a section called Items Under Consideration, which was a meditation on what I was going to do once I graduated. It was filled with entries like this:

What to Do/Future Plans

Why I Should Go into Journalism

P RO :

Fun!
Interesting!
Writing!
Activity and excitement!
Good people (maybe)
Social value

C ON :

No jobs available
Have to live in NYC for serious work on a magazine
Talent is questionable

Except for some interstitial waitressing, my first job out of college was writing for a tiny magazine in Oregon, and I made it clear at the interview that I would absolutely, positively die if I didnt get hired. After all, I knew being a writer would be Fun! Interesting! and full of Activity and excitement! I had no experience to speak of, except that I had been the editor of my high school yearbook. When I went to the job interview in Oregon, I brought a copy of the yearbook and a kind of wild, exuberant determination, which was the only thing that could account for my having gotten the job.

What I wanted to write about were the people and places around me. I didnt want to write about famous people simply because they were famous, and I didnt want to write about charming little things that were self-consciously charming and little; I wasnt interested in documenting or predicting trends, and I didnt have polemics to air or sociological theories to spin out. I just wanted to write what are usually called featuresa term that I hate because it sounds so fluffy and lightweight, like pillow stuffing, but that is used to describe stories that move at their own pace, rather than the news stories that race to keep time with events. The subjects I was drawn to were often completely ordinary, but I was confident that I could find something extraordinary in their ordinariness. I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was. The piece that convinced me this was possible was Mark Singers profile of three building superintendents that ran in The New Yorker when I was in college. The piece was eloquent and funny and full of wonder even though the subject was unabashedly mundane. After I read it, I had that rare, heady feeling that I now knew something about life I hadnt known before I read it. At the same time, the story was so natural that I couldnt believe it had never been written until then. Like the very best examples of literary nonfiction, it was at once familiar and original, like a folk melodyas good an example as you could ever find of the poetry of facts and the art in ordinary life.