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

After moving from Washington, DC, to the Jersey Shore, a former speechwriter for President Obama starts surfing at the age of thirty-five—the rough equivalent of beginning guitar lessons on your deathbed—and must turn for help to the only other surfer he knows: a tattooed, truck-driving, Joe Rogan superfan who happens to be his brother-in-law.

David Litt, the Yale-educated writer with a sensible fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with a truck and two motorcycles, had always coexisted from a comfortable distance as brothers-in-law. Yet, as David wallowed in existential dread while America’s crises piled up, he couldn’t help but notice that Matt seemed perfectly happy. When he wasn’t making money rewiring Jersey Shore beach homes, Matt was surfing waves at his favorite spots in the state.

Quietly, David started taking surfing lessons. For a few months, he suffered through wipeouts on waves the height of daffodils. But to his surprise, he soon became obsessed. And once he got a sense of the ways that fully committing to surfing could change him both in the water and on land, he set his sights on an unlikely goal: riding a big wave at Hawaii’s famously dangerous North Shore. To get there, he’d need Matt’s help.

At a moment when finding common ground seems more elusive than ever, this moving and poignant buddy comedy in the tradition of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and love letter to surfing in the vein of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, is a story about embracing the things—and the people—that scare us most.