His editor, Finnegan said, had to rein him in and remind him to keep it focused on himself as the main character. The book follows Finnegan as he chases waves to far-flung corners of the world, through his days as an ascetic surf bum and a freelance writer, up to through his current life in New York.Īs he was writing “Barbarian Days,” Finnegan recalled, he often went on tangents writing detailed portraits of surfers he met along the way. Finnegan grew up in southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, before his father - a television director - moved the family to Hawaii, where the author’s surfing obsession truly took hold and where the narrative begins. “Barbarian Days” earnestly delves deeply into the psychological and spiritual complexities of the surfer’s life, along with the struggle - familiar to any ski bum with off-mountain personal and professional ambitions - between this outdoor passion and his hopes for a life as a writer. That’s largely because it’s not a chest-thumping memoir of rad surf days - though the books is filled with mouthwatering descriptions of waves and rides in a multitude of paradises - but instead a clear-eyed portrait of the interior life of someone following a passion, a portrait of friendships, a coming-of-age story and a work of history. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography and to find a general readership far beyond the niche of hardcore surfers. Ironically, when it was published in 2015, “Barbarian Days” became Finnegan’s best-selling and most-acclaimed book. It was like, ‘Really, can I justify spending months and years on a book about my hobby?’ It seemed so lightweight and lame. “These subjects were important with a capital ‘I,’ where the urgency of the topic made you want to get the word out quickly,” Finnegan said. He chipped away at his surfing memoir for more than two decades, in between reports on humanitarian crises and geopolitics, and books about South African apartheid and American poverty. “So I thought, since the stereotype of surfers is not necessarily the best-informed people around, I could see other policy wonks saying, ‘Oh, wait. “I was involved in policy debates and criminal justice and I was editorializing about it,” he said.
Which has never been considered serious stuff, of course, except by serious surfers.įinnegan refers to writing that story as “coming out of the closet as a surfer.” So it was something of a surprise to readers when, in 1992, he published the instant classic two-part story “Playing Doc’s Games” about surfing with Doc Renneker in San Francisco and, in part, about his lifelong obsession with the sport. To put it bluntly, Finnegan writes about serious stuff.
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