We expect librarians to be everything to everybody, and they do a pretty damn good job of that, but there are limits to what they can do. I believe it was Kansas City that has a full-time social worker on staff, and I think that is a really good and important thing that I hope other libraries consider. There is strong suggestion that that might be true, but without the ability to examine any evidence-and there is no evidence at this point to examine-you can only speculate on it. I looked into one other possibility, which was the idea that it was misdiagnosed, that maybe it wasn’t arson. What I ended up really feeling about what this book can do is explore the story of the young man who was the main and only suspect and how and why that pursuit of him legally came to a very odd ending. If there is no witness, you can imagine how hard it can be to ever solve who started a fire. It can just be a match, and the match disappears.

It’s more amazing to me that any arson is ever solved, knowing now how little it takes to set a huge fire. First of all, arson is probably the most difficult crime to solve because the evidence is usually destroyed in the fire and it’s so easy to start a fire.

I remember when I pitched the book proposal, my publisher said, You’re going to solve the crime? And I said, Of course I am. Susan: I went into the project thinking that I would solve this unsolved crime, which is ridiculous, vain, arrogant, and absurd, but full of hope. On trying to solve the mystery behind The Library Book : It’s only getting worse, and that’s a very disturbing reality. They weren’t sure if the library was going to be closed for health reasons because of the air quality. I almost had one of my book tour events cancelled because it was in Ventura and there was a fire raging. They are part of this landscape and the fact that California is developed where you have populations in wild areas where a little spark from an electric line can trigger an enormous, devastating fire. Since the time I was writing that section of the book and now, we’ve had horrendous, devastating fires in California. You are conscious of fire, but it’s not the way it is in California where fire feels like this wild animal that lives out there and is waiting to pounce. When you live on the East Coast, as I did for so many years, of course you don’t want a building to burn down. Susan Orlean: I went back and reread that section, and it was chilling to realize.

That was before everything that’s happened now. Maris Kreizman: A chilling thing that I realized when we first talked about the book is that you discussed how much fires have shaped Los Angeles. This week on The Maris Review, Susan Orlean joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her latest book, The Library Book, now available in paperback from Simon & Schuster.

Book the library book by susan orlean