It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground - Hardcover

Litt, David

 
9781668035351: It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668035359 ISBN 13: 9781668035351
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * 2025 BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE SELECTION

A former Obama speechwriter moves to the Jersey Shore and learns to surf with the help of his brother-in-law: a tattooed, truck-driving Joe Rogan superfan.

David, the Yale-educated writer with a fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with a shed full of surfboards, had never been close. But as America’s crises piled up and David spiraled into existential dread, he noticed that his brother-in-law was thriving. He began to suspect Matt’s favorite hobby had something to do with it.

David started taking surf lessons. For months, he wiped out on waves the height of daffodils. Yet, after realizing that surfing could change him both in and out of the water, he set an audacious goal: riding a big wave in Hawaii. He searched for an expert he could trust to guide and protect him—and when he couldn’t find one, he asked Matt. Together, they set out on a journey that spanned coasts, and even continents, before taking them to Oahu’s famously dangerous North Shore.

It’s Only Drowning is a laugh-out-loud love letter to surfing—and so much more. It’s an ode to embarking on adventures at any age. It’s a blueprint for becoming braver at a time when it takes courage just to read the news. Most of all, it’s the story of an unlikely friendship, one that crosses the fault lines of education, ideology, and culture tearing so many of us apart.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Litt is the New York Times bestselling author of Thanks, Obama; Democracy in One Book or Less; and It’s Only Drowning. A former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama, described as “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologues, he has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and more. Along with writing speeches and jokes for political figures, athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs, and philanthropists, David was the head writer/producer at Funny Or Die, DC, and has written and sold comedy pilots for Comedy Central, ABC, and NBC. He and his wife divide their time between Washington, DC, and Asbury Park, New Jersey. Find out more at DavidLittBooks.com. 

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Chapter One: Surfing Is for Lunatics CHAPTER ONE Surfing Is for Lunatics
MATTHEW KAPPLER IS MY BROTHER-IN-LAW, and we’re very different, and one of the biggest differences between us is that if I lived like him I would die.

Matt owns two motorcycles. The first is a Kawasaki for racing, the second a Harley for roaring down the Garden State Parkway at speeds he once described as “only” a hundred miles per hour. He’s an electrician, and a good one, in part because of how seriously he takes his work, and in part because of how casually he takes the prospect of violent shocks. Matt once threw out his back training to be a mixed martial arts fighter. I once threw out my back lifting a bag of cat litter.

We met in the summer of 2012. I’d been dating his older sister, Jacqui, for about a year, and she and I had driven up from Washington, DC, to visit her parents in New Jersey. At the time I was a twenty-five-year-old speechwriter for Barack Obama, with sensibly parted hair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a strong preference for the half-Windsor tie knot over the more conventional four-in-hand. Matt was living at home. He was twenty-two years old, on the tail end of a rebel-without-a-cause phase that had begun, as far as I could tell, at birth.

Because I was busy trying to impress Jacqui’s parents during that initial visit, I didn’t pay much attention to her brother. Matt first appears in my memory not as a person but as a muscle shirt–wearing specter, floating silently to the kitchen to blend a protein shake before disappearing into the garage to jam on his electric guitar. But more trips followed; my future in-laws lived minutes from the Jersey Shore, so Jacqui and I started coming up for beach weekends each summer.

Matt and I thus got to know each other a little better, and the better we got to know each other, the clearer it became that we had absolutely nothing in common. My professional life revolved around politics; he had never registered to vote. Matt played in a locally famous ska band; I played in a co-ed recreational Ultimate Frisbee league. My idea of a perfect meal was a bowl of homemade knife-cut noodles, studded with bits of pork and drenched in chili oil, from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the university where I studied on a summer fellowship that sent Ivy League undergraduates to Beijing. His was chicken tenders.

I didn’t dislike Matt. I found him quite interesting, in the way all men who need two computer monitors for work find all men who need a pickup truck for work quite interesting. But we never became anything like friends.

The closest we got to bonding were the times when, in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, I asked him about small details of his life. The tattoo covering his left shoulder, for instance. It depicted a giant robotic claw reaching across his collarbone, slicing his flesh with metal talons, and ripping back his skin to reveal a bloody mess of muscle and machine parts.

“So, Matt,” I once asked, in my best NPR voice, “what made you decide to get that tattoo?”

He thought for a second, then shrugged contentedly.

“I dunno.”

I tried conjuring a follow-up and couldn’t. I’ve been told that one of my first words was ambivalent. To permanently brand oneself with any image, of any size, struck me as an inconceivably risky invitation to regret. And to pick an image that was huge, gruesome, and highly visible, for basically no reason? I was left gasping in confusion like a goldfish plucked from its bowl.

Which is all to say that when, five years after we met, Matt bought a beat-up used surfboard, I did not think, At last, a healthful pastime that might bring me closer to my future brother-in-law! I thought, Surfing is for lunatics.

Nothing in the years that followed changed my view. On one occasion, Matt arrived at a family gathering wild-eyed, his light-brown hair not so much tousled as beaten. He’d woken at dawn, he explained as though this were normal, and spent his morning being pummeled against rocks and slammed into the seabed. I would have found this alarming at any time of year, even summer, when the Jersey Shore is packed with beachgoers. But this was Christmas Day.

“Aren’t you worried about, you know, drowning?”

“Neh,” he replied, in his slightly pinched Jersey accent. I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t.

“Okay. What about freezing to death?”

“The best waves are in winter,” he said, in what I could not help but notice was not an answer to my question. “You should try it.”

I declined his offer, not so much verbally as through my very existence. It was true that once, on a family trip to Mexico, I’d taken something described as a “surf lesson,” during which I knelt on a plank for an hour while a teenager rolled his eyes and pushed me toward a beach. But surfing—really surfing—was clearly different. Along with absurd levels of fitness and dexterity, it required a near-total lack of common sense.

It also seemed like a waste of time. My adult life had been defined by a line from Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign: “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” Even after leaving the White House, I’d remained a proudly earnest workaholic. I filled my days, along with most nights and weekends, with productivity. Writing books and TV pilots. Working on speeches for private clients. Volunteering for campaigns. While each project was different, when you zoomed out far enough the goal was always the same: to change the world.

Matt seemed to surf for no higher purpose whatsoever. He did it simply because he enjoyed it. That made no sense to me.

In 2018, Jacqui and I got married in Asbury Park, a Jersey Shore town best known as the spot where Bruce Springsteen got his start. The following year we bought a small vacation house there. It was listed, optimistically, as a “Victorian cottage,” and located a half mile from the beach. Sometimes while strolling the boardwalk, I’d see a gaggle of wetsuit-clad figures bobbing like apples in the sea. Every so often, one would turn, stand, and cruise toward shore.

It was noteworthy: these individuals were not my brother-in-law, yet they surfed. Still, nothing could change what was, in my opinion, the most relevant fact about Matt’s favorite hobby. If it was for people like him, it wasn’t for people like me.

Besides, I was an adult now, with a wife and a mortgage and two cats and intermittent back pain and a determination to make the most of my limited time on earth. To the extent I looked toward the ocean and thought, I wish I’d tried it, surfing was just another scribble on the map of roads not taken that people in their early thirties can’t help but draw. I should have seen Tom Petty in concert. I should have made out with Leah Franklin at that party freshman year. I should have learned to surf. Who cares?

The answer, as it turned out, was me. Enormously.

And all it took to realize it was the worst year of my life.

When I was four years old, I was terrified—absolutely terrified—that Saddam Hussein would emerge from my toilet and strangle me.

This was during the first Gulf War, so my fear was rational, assuming you knew, as I did, the rules governing Saddam’s...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668035359
ISBN 13 
9781668035351
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
River House
mail@indigo.de

Schlachthofstr. 36 A
Hamburg
21079
Deutschland

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