It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, was published this week by Simon & Schuster. Written by former Obama speechwriter and joke writer David Litt, it’s a memoir about the author learning to surf with his brother-in-law Matt – a tattooed, truck-driving, Joe Rogan superfan. 

At a moment when our divisions have never been deeper, It’s Only Drowning is a hopeful story about bridging the fault lines of education, class, and culture being exploited by so many in the Trump era. In choosing it as a “Best Book of June,” Barnes & Noble described it as, “A raucous, insightful and timely memoir about human connection and the schisms that separate us from each other.” 

The following is an adapted excerpt, and you can get the book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or a local independent bookstore through Bookshop.org. 

I never meant to buy a board made by a company with the same name as my therapist. Then again, if that were true, why was I so careful not to mention surfboard Stewart to human Stewart on our Zooms?

There was something else I didn’t like discussing with Stewart (the therapist, not the surfboard): my brother-in-law Matt. The two of us had never had anything in common. Matt listened to death metal while I listened to show tunes. He was into Ultimate Fighting while I was into ultimate frisbee. I had an Ivy League degree and was one of President Obama’s former speechwriters, he had an electrician’s license and was one of Joe Rogan’s biggest fans. 

But in the summer of 2022, after my wife and I moved to the Jersey Shore during the pandemic, I’d started surfing. I needed a partner in the water who could help me avoid drowning as I tried to improve enough to ride waves on Hawaii’s famously dangerous North Shore. Matt was the only other surfer I knew. Suddenly – and despite still having nothing in common – we started hanging out. 

“So, like you like spending time with him?” Stewart had asked.

“I like that Matt’s willing to surf with me,” I replied. “It’s helpful.” 

Stewart furrowed his brows, as he often did when he felt I was being stingy with my subconscious. 

By the fall of 2023, six weeks before our big Hawaii expedition, my would-be answer to Stewart’s question was more complicated than ever. We’d spent countless hours together in and out of the water – catching waves, on surf trips, in car rides. But where I’d expected to find vast tracts of common ground, we remained firmly on opposite sides of the culture war. When Hurricane Franklin arrived, sending the first big swell of the season to New Jersey, a big part of me wanted to surf it alone. I suspected Matt felt the same. 

What kept us together, in the end, was a fear of awkwardness. Instead of telling my brother-in-law how I felt, I hopped in his truck so we could paddle out together. 

It was ninety minutes before sunset when we parked near the beach, and Matt waxed his board with typical impatience. As we scurried down a bluff, though, I could tell something was off. He wasn’t trotting ahead of me, which was unlike him when the waves were big. Each time his foot touched the ground, he winced.

“You okay?”

“My back,” Matt said. “I pulled it pretty bad yesterday.”

He stretched for longer than usual. As he struggled to touch his ankles, I noticed the beginning of a widow’s peak in his hairline. His beard had a dab of gray, too, like a spot of mold on an otherwise fresh block of cheese. I was just a few weeks from my thirty-seventh birthday. But it had never really occurred to me: Matt was getting older, too.

A teenager on a potato-chip shortboard raced into the surf, took a flying leap, and ducked under an approaching wave. Matt took halting steps toward the water, lowering himself onto his Pyzel without his usual sprightliness before paddling outside.

I remained on shore, scanning the water and choosing between the lesser of three evils. On the right was a sideways current more powerful than any I’d previously encountered. In the center, the evil was a rip, which turned the surrounding water into a gauntlet of collapsing, lopsided peaks.

The evil on the left was the wave itself. It arrived on its own private schedule, just once every fifteen minutes, and seemed designed in a lab to imperil surfers. While its size was terrifying—easily ten feet—what really scared me was how it broke. First, the lip shot out a fist of foam just powerful enough to knock a rider off balance. A moment later, this initial jab was followed by a powerful hook that sent an avalanche of whitewater—and anyone caught up in it—surging into the boulders of the south jetty. No one was even trying to surf that wave. It was clearly unrideable.

Trusting the wisdom of crowds, I paddled surfboard Stewart in their direction. Only as the sun was setting did I finally start looking for Matt. I had a good idea of where I’d find him. He wouldn’t chase the giant peak by the south jetty—even he would know that was suicide—so, like me, he’d have to choose between a crowd to the right and chaos in the center. I knew which one he’d pick. I spotted him halfway between the jetties, searching for a decent wave inside the rip.

It wasn’t going well. Everything was against him. He had to paddle nonstop just to avoid being caught in the current, and the peaks he hunted appeared with little warning. Then there was his form. He slogged through the ocean with less power than usual, each movement restricted in concession to his sore back.

For forty-five minutes, I watched him struggle in vain. Finally, he gave up and paddled toward me. It’s really happening, I thought as he drew closer. He’s about to join the rest of us. He drew twenty yards away, then ten. I could see the defeat in his eyes. Then, suddenly, he wheeled on his shortboard and paddled in the direction from which he’d come.

I wasn’t sure what he was doing. Then he crossed the invisible line running through the beach’s center, and I knew. He had his eyes on the south jetty, with its unrideable wave. He was going to try to ride it.

Because his paddle strokes were labored and the current strong, he approached his target in slow motion. That gave everyone around me time to realize what was taking place. One by one, my fellow surfers looked up from their private struggles, transfixed by the lunatic on the Pyzel.

For someone who loathed crowds, Matt had a showman’s timing. Right as he set himself up outside the rocks—a place where, if he fell, there would be no escaping disaster—the far-off peak began gathering strength. On my side of the break, twenty-four eyes widened. The wave roared toward him, building in height and vehemence, enraged by the presence of a challenger. Spray feathered off the crest like sparks from a knife being sharpened. I’d seen Matt take off hundreds of times, yet even I wondered: Is he really going to go?

He went, and I could tell at once his position was off. Right before he could leap to his feet, the lip punched his board, knocking him flat. I knew what it felt like to lose one’s agency to the ocean, to have free will ripped away by a breaking wave. But I’d never seen it happen to Matt. Now it was happening at the worst possible time. Transformed into a helpless object, a piece of detritus, he clung to his board as the lip hurled him toward the rocks.

He was halfway over the falls when something seemed to bolt upright inside him. Chest springing off the deck, head snapping toward the bottom of the face, he paddled more ferociously than I’d ever seen him paddle, clawing at the water like a man buried alive. He caught up with the breaking lip, which should have been impossible. Then he passed it. Grabbing his outside edge, he sprung into a crouch. For a moment, his board left the water’s surface. He hovered in midair. Then he jammed his inside rail into the face and took off, roaring clear from the detonating peak. With the jetty safely behind him, he leaned into the wall of water, shot skyward to the lip, cut back, raced into the pocket to regain speed, and shot skyward again.

His ride took him all the way across the beach, and as he rocketed past, a dozen heads turned as though leashed to his tail. I stopped watching Matt surf, and started watching the surfers watching him. One let out a low whistle. Another’s jaw literally dropped.

Matt hopped off his board by the north jetty. Ignoring the current, he paddled back out as though nothing had happened. Anyone seeing him for the first time would think he didn’t care about having a witness, let alone an audience, and for a moment I thought so, too. Then I saw him subtly angle his board in my direction.

“Nice!” I said, as he drew within earshot.

“Yeah, that was pretty sweet.” He paddled off in search of more waves.

This time, though, only eleven heads turned to follow him. The man whose jaw dropped had shifted his gaze to me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His look said it all.

You know that guy?

Hurricane season was just a few hours old, and it was already getting the best of me. But as I paddled to stay in place, arms aching, back numb, no waves to show for my effort, the corners of my mouth curled in satisfaction.

Yeah, I thought, surprised by just how proud I felt. I know that guy.

A former senior speechwriter for President Obama, this is David Litt’s third book. You can find It’s Only Drowning at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or an independent bookstore via Bookshop.org.