A Few More Hours

Some big news, a final excerpt, and the cactus of existential dread.

Today is the last day of launch week for It’s Only Drowning. I was hoping the headline of this post would refer to one event rather than two. But that’s not how it worked out.

So, first things first, Senate Republicans are racing to cut Medicaid and give tax breaks to billionaires. They might do vote on their megabill as soon as today.

If you have to choose between calling your Senators and buying my book, call your Senators. Especially if you live in Alaska, Iowa, North Carolina, or Maine.

But if you don’t have to choose, there are only a few hours left in publication week for It’s Only Drowning. I hope you’ll pick up a copy before time runs out.

I’ve talked a lot about why week-one sales are so important, but I wanted to give you a concrete example. Yesterday, I walked our dog Emily over to East City Bookshop in D.C. so I could sign some copies. They had five in stock - which is great!

Now imagine if, to the booksellers’ surprise, three of those five get sold today. Maybe that inspirers a store manager who normally reads fiction to read It’s Only Drowning, and she starts recommending it. Maybe the store leaves the book on the front table all summer, not just for the for the next two weeks. Maybe, when they order more copies from Simon & Schuster, it gives my publisher’s sales team an anecdote to share with other bookstores, and they start recommending it, too.

It’s what my publisher calls “the flywheel” for a book. And today is the very last day we can get it spinning.

Which brings me to some exciting news: I was on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning to talk about the book! I haven’t listened to the interview yet, but my editor tells me I elicited three guffaws, which is a promising number. And Scott Simon was incredibly kind and put me immediately at ease - he’s a legendary host for a reason.

A big interview like Weekend Edition is exactly the kind of thing that gets the flywheel going. It means this book will finish launch week strong. But because the rest of the week was so crazy - I had two TV interviews, a big podcast, and at least two major op-eds moved to later in the summer because of Iran - even Scott Simon’s guffaws aren’t, on their own, enough to get the book off the ground.

Which is why I’m so incredibly grateful for you. My favorite part of this week - and there’s been a lot of competition - has been reading your comments. Just this morning, a reader wrote to tell me her husband Steve is the world’s toughest critic but loves this book - and that it’s even helped him with his doomscrolling habit. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

If we can win over Steve, then I’m confident there are thousands of people - maybe even millions - who will love It’s Only Drowning. If they ever find out about it. And to be totally honest, if launch week comes close but falls just short, the odds of this book breaking through go way down.

So, while I know I’ve spent all week asking you to get your hardcover copy “today,” I’m going to change things up a little bit.

Could you pick up a copy of It’s Only Drowning right now?

One crazy thing about books is that the line between a first-week hit and a first-week miss is tiny. 100 copies - which is to say, 1% of the number of people who subscribe to this newsletters - could easily be the difference. So if you wonder whether picking up your copy right now vs. tomorrow really matters, it absolutely does.

Thank you again for giving It’s Only Drowning a chance to succeed - and I hope that together, in the next few hours, we can push this book over the top.

Okay, on to the excerpt. (Which, if you live in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, or North Carolina, I hope you’ll read after calling your Senators.) For me, in order for a story to be book-worthy, there are three conditions that have to be met.

• I have to be embarrassing myself.

• I have to be learning something.

• The lesson I’m learning has to be something that would help other people, too.

This final excerpt I’ll post comes from Chapter Three of the book, and it’s really the moment when I realized all of these conditions were being met. It starts with my second surf lesson, at a moment when I still felt completely overwhelmed by all the terribleness in the news.

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“I’ve noticed a problem,” I said to Katie just before our lesson ended. “It frequently feels like the wave is going to break directly on top of me, and, well, kill me. What do I do about that?”

I braced myself for another unhelpful don’t-worry-about-it response. To my surprise, Katie beamed.

“The flower of fear!”

“Huh?”

“When you paddle for a wave, and you feel the flower of fear opening, it’s a good thing. That feeling is one of the most important parts of surfing. It’s how you know you’re in the right spot.”

This was a notion I’d never encountered. I’d always thought of fear as something to be overcome or succumbed to, faced or ignored. But the way Katie saw it, fear, when harnessed correctly, was not just good, but essential, a source of power and drive. She had described not just a different way to think about waves, but a different way to think about everything. I floated on my Wavestorm, doing my best to embrace this transformational new idea.

“Or,” I said, unable to help myself, “the flower of fear means you’re about to die.”

Part of the problem was my age. The best time to start surfing, I learned long after the knowledge might have helped me, is between five and seven years old. Fifteen is pushing it. Twenty is over the hill. Thirty is geriatric. To pick up a board at thirty-five, as I did, is the rough equivalent of signing up for guitar lessons on your deathbed.

That hasn’t stopped people from trying. I was one of millions of adults who grabbed a foamboard during the pandemic. The surf industry welcomed the influx of beginners. So did the internet, where a cornucopia of viral gurus now caters to those picking up a board later in life.

Hardcore surfers take a slightly different approach to all the newcomers. They hate them. Some use “VAL”—short for “vulnerable adult learner”—as a slur.

A few surfers are more eloquent, but no less disdainful. At Glide, the surf shop where Katie worked, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life sat on a table between the sunscreen and wax. I bought a copy, and read author William Finnegan—who by all accounts is an otherwise liberal and tolerant person—describe adult learners like me.

“People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and they usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.”

How dare he assume something like that? I thought. And also, how dare he be right? While my own surfing life spanned all of two weeks, I’d already compiled an encyclopedia of discomfort: the swollen knee from landing funny on the deck of my board; the throbbing in my shoulders each time I thrashed out another paddle stroke; the bruised left butt cheek from falling backward in ankle-deep water.

Yet I didn’t quit. I returned to the surf break at the dog beach twice more the week of my first solo session, and four more times the week after that. I could count the total number of successful pop-ups on my fingers, so it wasn’t the rush of riding waves that kept me coming back. It was something deeper. During each surf session I felt frustrated, exhausted, humiliated, terrified, depleted, confused, and sore—but never depressed. While flailing in pursuit of whitewater may not have been fun, it was something different to think about.

It paused the spin cycle in my mind.

Surfing even made it easier to stop worrying about the news. While I was in the water, instead of asking, Are we witnessing, in real time, the devastation of our planet, the rise of fascism, and the death of the American Dream? I asked, Is this wave about to snap me in half? I remained skeptical that fear was a flower. But it certainly felt preferable to the cactus of existential dread.

My next lesson with an instructor named Jamie. He was a teenager, which terrified me. But he was actually an excellent teacher. Near the end of our session, he put a hand on my board, looked me in the eye, and spoke as though he were the older and wiser one.

“I’m gonna leave you with this,” he said. “There’s gonna be sessions where you’re gonna wipe out four times for every time you pop up, and it’s gonna be incredibly discouraging. You just have to remember that every time you fall, you’re a better surfer than you were before.”

I drove straight to the dog beach after my lesson. After getting “out the back”—past the impact zone where the waves are crashing—I kept my knees pressed together, paddled like my life depended on it, and angled down the line. The invisible hand sent me gliding.

Where Jamie’s advice really helped, though, wasn’t during the rides. It was after the wipeouts. I was tired. My triceps ached with each paddle stroke, a sure sign that every larger, more powerful muscle had already abandoned ship. Trying to push my chest off the board was like jacking up a car with a pair of pool noodles. But instead of snarling in frustration, I thought to myself, You’re better than you were before.

“Did you have fun?” Jacqui asked out of habit when I got home.

“Yeah! It was amazing!”

I tried applying Jamie’s words of wisdom to other facets of my life. Charring a burger made me a better chef; trying and failing to stay off Twitter made me a better time manager. One afternoon, I put Jacqui’s workout leggings through the dryer on regular instead of tumble dry low, and they emerged several sizes smaller. I gave her a pensive look.

“This means I’m better at laundry,” I explained. She found this particular claim unconvincing.

But the broader point was undeniable: becoming a slightly better surfer made me a slightly different person.

And if that was the case, what might becoming a much better surfer do?

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Thanks again for being with me (metaphorically, and sometimes literally at book events) all week. And always, if you have a review, a favorite line, or a question about the writing process I’d love to read it!