The honesty of Susan Orlean's drunk tweets were a balm for my pressure-cooked soul

The ancient Greeks had Plato. The French had Joan of Arc. To every generation, its own saviour. And for thousands of stunned and delighted people over the weekend, that person was American author Susan Orlean.

Tweeting while drunk, the award-winning author unleashed a thread of off-the-cuff declarations that became viral for their unabashed honesty about how the last few months had left her “SICK AND TIRED OF EVERYTHING” and, possibly, a little unhinged.

“I’m falling down drunk,” she tweeted, early on in the piece. “First time in ages. Where is my kitty? He is my drunk comfort animal.”

Orlean, who was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the movie Adaptation (the movie version of Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief) then proceeded to take readers on a journey, which included not only her search for lollies in her house – "We do ha e so@e weird candy coated fennel seeds. Is that f---ing candy?" – but also her concern that her neighbours know she's drunk ("You guys. Do you tho k my neighbours I'm a. never mind I'm going f to bed"), to her philosophical assessment of the moment she met a newborn foal, at the home of her neighbours, earlier in the evening: "He thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life's infinite tragedy."

The public was charmed. Thousands of people responded, with everything from hangover advice to offers of friendship (from, among others, American comedian Kathy Griffin), and appreciation for her “writerly abandon” and “truly joyous tweets” (care of Australian political writer Annabel Crabb).

The overwhelming feeling among responders, though, was profound gratitude that they had found a new friend who understood exactly what they were going through. I, for one, felt a mariachi band dance through my heart when I read Orlean’s tweets. They were the perfect antidote to the brain-pounding pressure that I – and many others - have been feeling that we will, and should, come out of this binfire of a year burnished and gleaming, with not only a kitchen full of fragrant sourdough, but a perspective on suffering and loss that could likely be a beacon for future generations. I think I speak for many when I say: no.

Kindred spirits celebrated Susan Orlean's tipsy tweeting on the weekend.Credit: SMH

When, for instance, The New York Times ran a piece in March with the headline, “Someday, We’ll Look Back On All Of This And Write A Novel”, I was probably screaming “Stop fighting!” at my children, with the widened eyes of a Disney villain, to which my kids likely replied, in unison, “We’re laughing”.

I can’t be sure – time has begun to feel like Salvador Dali’s melting watch, if it were dipped in over-ripe blue cheese – but it’s been happening a lot these days. Months of homeschooling three children, while working at a new job has not done wonders for my kindness, or patience.

It’s why I – and so many others – felt a burst of joy in April, when Nobel prize-winning Australian immunologist Professor Peter Doherty showed the world what was really on his mind by accidentally tweeting, “Dan Murphy opening hours” instead of plugging the request into a search engine.

Because, while countless articles by therapists have urged us to look for stories of “resilience and hope” in order to make us feel better “despite the uncertainty”, nothing, for my money, soothes an ailing mind more than seeing that others – even better, when they’re two great minds – have briefly lost their footing, or need a crutch to manage this ridiculously uncomfortable time.

I’m lucky, in that a precious few friends of mine are similarly inclined. The other night, over dinner, I answered honestly when a friend asked how I was, and said: “I’m better now, but I was feeling quite down for a bit.” She responded that she’d been feeling the same way.

From a few steps away you would have thought we were cooing about a recent dip in warm Bahamian waters, so beatific were our smiles. That’s the balm of unvarnished honesty.

And, at a time when more of us are more isolated than ever before, we now also have the candid admissions of Orlean and Doherty (the latter also quoted Dorothy Parker, tweeting: "I'd rather have a bottle in front'er me than a frontal lobotomy.")

I’m not sure that Orlean’s Twitter feed will, as one Washington Post journalist put it on Monday, “be studied” one day to see how it “will fit into the canon of [her] work”.

But one can’t argue with how finely Orlean has identified the key struggles of this time. As she tweeted at one point: “Lord help me I’ve just ordered a romper."