William Finnegan has made a career of reporting stories in far-flung parts of the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, even Sunnyside, Washington, where in 1996 he wrote about the gang troubles plaguing the Yakima Valley community.
He’s been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1987 and has published five books – four of them works of in-depth journalism dealing with apartheid-era South Africa, Mozambique and hard lives in America.
For his latest book, Finnegan got personal. His memoir “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life” recounts his lifelong obsession with riding the waves. As the Washington Post noted in its review, “A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport – its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes – in a way that should resonate with surfers and nonsurfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world’s most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful.”
“Barbarian Days” made a number of year-end lists, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and earlier this month was named winner of the Pulitzer Prize for memoir.
Finnegan, who hails from California but now lives in Manhattan, will be in town on Friday for a reading and Q&A as part of the Eastern Washington University Visiting Writers series, sponsored by Get Lit and the Inland Northwest Center for Writers. In an email interview, Finnegan talked about the difficulties in writing about himself, the state of magazine journalism and breaking down the mythology of surfing.
Q. Your day job is journalist. How difficult was it to tell your own story for “Barbarian Days”?
A. Memoir goes against pretty much all journalistic practice and instincts. Reporting, at least for the kind of long-form narrative I mainly write, means figuring out how things work, what happened, what makes people tick, and then telling coherent stories about it. With this book, I had to resist, at every turn, the impulse to profile in full people who fascinate me and happened to be in the story, resist the impulse to analyze and describe at length places that particularly interested me, all of that. The protagonist of this story is me, which for a reporter just feels off. But memoir is a weird genre for a journalist also because, at least for me with this book, it did involve a lot of reporting, in the sense of research and trying to get things right, and reconciling different people’s memories of events, but basically what you’re investigating is your own past. And of course this is all private life we’re talking about. Nothing was on the record. So here I’m giving myself license to depict all these shared, unguarded moments with friends and loved ones. That’s a big arrogation. You need to do a lot of hard thinking about what to include and what to leave out. That said, I can’t remember enjoying writing anything as much as I did “Barbarian Days.” Usually, I don’t enjoy writing much at all.
Q. A writer who doesn’t enjoy writing? What don’t you like about it, given that it is your chosen profession?
A. I guess there are writers who enjoy the act of writing. I knew an annoying guy in San Francisco who used to claim that was true of him, and his work did have a certain bonelessness, a tone of deeply smug self-satisfaction. Actually, I’ve always heard that A.J. Liebling, who is one of my favorite writers, got a kick out of his own prose. But Liebling was the one in a million whose delight was merited. I’m half-kidding. Nobody forces me to write, and it’s not exactly hard labor. I started writing as a kid, wrote three unpublished novels in longhand as a teenager and a very young man. In fact, I wrote thousands of pages before anybody paid me a dime to do it. So it’s not like I’d rather be doing something else. I wouldn’t. Still, for me, and for most of the good writers I know well enough to speak for, it’s about as fun as opening up a vein. Everybody’s pleased with having written, but writing itself is mentally arduous, don’t you think? Big parts of “Barbarian Days” came relatively easy for me, and some parts of most projects flow along nicely. But the majority of my time writing is spent beating my head against the wall and berating myself for not being able to get it down on the page as splendidly as I saw it in my head before I started.
Q. There’s such romance and mythology to surfing. I was amused by the Guardian’s frequent references to the Beach Boys in its profile on you from last year. Did you feel the need to write to dispel the myth?
A. Yes, I did. Not just the old Beach Boys image of surfing, all that fun in the sun in an idealized Southern California, but also contemporary commercial imagery, all the color-saturated video and photography being used to sell everything from light trucks to life insurance. This subliminal visual onslaught, which has only grown in ubiquity over the 50 years I’ve been noticing it, creates a kind of mass illusion of familiarity with a pastime that’s actually a world unto itself, quite opaque to outsiders. Most people know little or nothing about surfing, and most of what they think they know is incorrect. So I did feel like I was introducing readers to a new world with this book. That didn’t strike me as an urgent task – setting people straight about surfing – but it was fun to try to get it right, and I love hearing from readers who have zero interest in surfing but enjoy the book. I love hearing that it is not actually about surfing, even though a lot of it is.
Q. This year three New Yorker writers won Pulitzers – yourself, TV critic Emily Nussbaum and Kathryn Schultz (whose reporting on the Cascadia subduction zone made an entire region very, very nervous). What does that say to you about the strength of magazine journalism in general?
A. Good criticism thrives in magazines more than anywhere, I think. Kathryn, whose earthquake piece rightly won that prize, is a wonderful book critic. Her recent takedown of Thoreau and “Walden” was a barn-burner. The business model for magazines (and for newspapers) has been under severe pressure, obviously, forcing many publications to fold and driving a lot of good work online, where the pay for writers is generally worse than in print. But the magazines that have survived are, in most cases, tighter and livelier than they were before the Internet storm first blew up. Of course, some mags have become painfully fluffy (or vanished) since their hard-news function was obliterated by media with a faster metabolism.
Q. What are you working on these days?
A. A couple of New Yorker pieces. My last big piece was about the shootings in San Bernardino, which required some reporting on jihadism in the West, which led me to start a profile of a federal prosecutor who has brought a lot of interesting terror cases. This prosecutor has been trying to show, through her work, that the U.S. criminal justice system can offer an alternative to the moral and diplomatic disaster of Guantanamo.
