The "Susan Orlean" depicted in Adaptation is a female human who wrote The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession - similarities end there:

The movie Adaptation portrays real-life author Susan Orlean in so perversely inaccurate a manner that studio executives were ''terrified'' that Orlean might halt the production, she says.

Meryl Streep portrays Orlean in the film as a drug-taking adulterer who, among other shenanigans, posts topless photographs of herself on the Internet.

None of that is true, insists Orlean...

...But Orlean isn't worried.

''The people who know me know what's true and what's not true,'' she says. ''The people who read my work can probably guess what's real and not real. The general public? Let's hope they get it. And if they don't, they won't think I'm a real person. Or they'll just think I'm wild.

''And in the general scheme of things, I'd rather be perceived as wild than boring.'' [USA Today]