Take the Ride
New Yorker writer William Finnegan talks to Richard Warnica about his new surfing memoir, and lifelong love affair with the waves
Nineteen years ago, William Finnegan, by then a longtime writer for The New Yorker, spent several months reporting on skinhead gangs in Antelope Valley, California. He embedded with rival groups, one racist, the other anti-racist. He learned their stories. He tracked their violent lives. He became enmeshed in what he described as the “stark downward mobility” of their “toxic exurban pond.”
In Barbarian Days, his new memoir, Finnegan compresses the chaos of those months — which culminated in the stabbing death of one teen by another — into two paragraphs. Even those appear only tangentially. The focus instead is on what he was doing when he wasn’t reporting. “I felt spiritually poisoned ... by the story I was working on,” Finnegan writes in the book. “Surfing had never made more sense.”
Barbarian Days is a 450-page, five-decade chronicle of Finnegan’s life in surfing. It is, in many ways, a remarkable work. It tracks through different eras and different worlds and many different versions of the boy Finnegan was and the man he became. The narrative flows through Hawaii, California, the South Pacific, Africa, Spain and New York City. It examines boyhood, friendship, race, sex, apartheid and the march of time. But always in the foreground, ahead of anything else, are the waves.
Finnegan describes in fantastic and sometimes minute detail surf sessions from decades ago and sometimes last year. The waves batter and freeze him. They suck him under and leave him panting for air. Some come close to killing him. And yet, he keeps chasing them, endlessly, even as his own life evolves. He still surfs today, sometimes in the cold winter waters off New York — where he lives with his wife and daughter — and sometimes on surf trips around the world. He often stays up all night, even now in late middle age, to catch up on work abandoned to a decent swell.
“I’ve known plenty of people who have tried to quit or who have quit or have drifted away from it. But once you’re in deep among hardcore surfers, quitting is a pretty horrible idea, generally,” Finnegan says, in an interview Tuesday, the morning his book came out. “I actually thought it might be interesting for readers to see how somebody, a writer in my case, tries to fit this kind of addiction into the rest of life, into family life and a fairly demanding line of work — political journalism. So it’s sort of this story about this struggle to become a responsible citizen and equally this struggle against responsibility.”
The reporting that went into Barbarian Days started 30 years ago, in San Francisco. Finnegan was just then breaking out as a magazine writer. He’d sold his first, short piece to The New Yorker and someone in the editor’s office asked him if he had an idea for something longer. “Right off the top of my head, trying to think of something, I said ‘ How about a profile of this physician and big wave surfer here in San Francisco?’” Finnegan says.
That story, about a man named Mark “Doc” Renneker, took him seven years to write. He did other things in the meantime. He moved to New York City. He published a book, about teaching at an all-black school in apartheid South Africa. But the Renneker story kept lingering. “I was kind of nervous about coming out of the closet as a surfer,” Finnegan said. “I mean, I was a political reporter and writing a lot of political opinion pieces for The New Yorker and I had a kind of reluctance to expose this part of my life and have a bunch of people say ‘What do you know? You’re just a dumb surfer.’ ”
That never happened. And after the story finally came out, there was talk of turning it into a book. “Instead I said, ‘Well, I’ve surfed other places, with other people, more interesting than San Francisco. And I sort of backed into the idea of a memoir,” Finnegan says. Twenty-three years later, the last 10 of which were spent actively working on this book, Barbarian Days emerged.
The book alternates throughout between the surf and the larger story of Finnegan’s life. The first chapter, an extended disquisition on race and childhood in Hawaii, was excerpted earlier this year in The New Yorker. It’s a stunning piece of writing. But it’s also perhaps the least surf-heavy part of the book. That’s no accident. Finnegan said he had to consciously work at mixing other stories — about school, friends, fights and family — into the larger tale. “It’s easy for me to write about the act of surfing. I find it endlessly interesting,” he said. “The trick is to make it interesting to readers who couldn’t care less. That’s hard. You have to get them out into the water, keep them oriented and give them a stake in the outcome.”
Finnegan describes surfing as both an obsession and a paradox. “You surf in solitude, you and the ocean,” he said. “And yet there’s also this performance ... it’s a dance. You’re trying to do it gracefully and well. That’s at the heart of most people’s surfing.” In many ways, that paradox — the mix of the private and the performative — is echoed in his writing life. “Riding a wave well feels very much like putting together a sentence that works,” he wrote in an email after the interview. “Figuring out how to read a wave, how to tell what a wave is doing, is like figuring out a story.”
Finnegan’s story in Barbarian Days stretches across so many years — nearly 60 — that by the end it becomes, inevitably, about time itself. Even as he continues to surf, his body begins to betray him. He loses other things, too, more important things. Near the end of the book he pulls out a short sentence — “You have to hate how the world goes on” — and lets it float alone in a sea of white text.
It was a sentence that wrote itself “in a moment of heavy emotion,” Finnegan said. He didn’t tinker with it. He didn’t rethink it 1,000 times. It came from recounting the death of his mother and stood for other losses in his life, including the death of his father. But it represents something larger about the book itself. “It was also a leaden, unhappy gesture toward the passage of time generally,” Finnegan said in his email. “Our youths are fled, and that is felt strongly, I think, over the course of the book.”
The book ends with Finnegan in the water, surfing off a Fijian island. He doesn’t keep meticulous track of his surfing days. But he likes to think he still gets out 50 to 100 times a year. “I keep intending to dial it back,” he said at one point in the interview. But then, a few minutes later, he added: “If we get a run of good waves here, I try to work at night and surf all day.”