Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

Okay, I know you don’t surf, probably never have and likely never will. That doesn’t mean you won’t love William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. And if you do surf, you’ll love it even more. 

Finnegan, staff writer for The New Yorker, began surfing as a child. What started as a healthy before-and-after-school hobby, quickly became a life-long passion that influenced school, work and family. Because of his love for surfing, Finnegan dropped out of college, worked a few dead-end jobs, ended relationships and began new ones as he chased waves from Hawaii to South Africa, Australia to Madeira. He was one of the very first surfers to discover the “perfect” wave at Tavarua, Fiji, before it became a private surf-tourism destination. 

After finishing university, Finnegan moved to San Francisco and later, New York, where he experienced urban waves at places like Ocean Beach and Long Island. From young gun, charging every wave no matter how big or dangerous, to middle age and beyond, taking his daughter out with him, Finnegan chronicles a lifetime surfing and writing about surfing. The Paris Review calls Barbarian Days, “ a semi-dangerous book, one that persuades young men…to trade in their office jobs in order to roam the world.” 

Read Barbarian Days and you, too, can roam the world chasing waves. All without getting wet. And you can reserve it here.

An Afghan Family Story

The Boston Marathon bombing was horrific, as were the shootings at Sandy Hook, Aurora, and Columbine.  Imagine: the Afghan author of Fort of Nine Towers lived through decades of such horrors. Some of the scenes in Qais Akbar Omar’s memoir are so revolting, especially the scenes of systematic torture, that it seems miraculous that the author survived.

Not only did he survive, he retained his love and respect for life and for his country.

Omar was a young boy in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union’s occupation. Life was good for his middle class family. His father and grandfather sold carpets, his mother worked in a bank, there was a large extended family that spent time together, and Omar enjoyed going to school and flying kites with his favorite cousin, Wakeel.

But when the Soviet Union pulled out, Afghanistan dissolved into civil war.  Factional fighting slowly destroyed Omar’s neighborhood and his family’s way of life, and Omar and his family became internal exiles in their own country. Omar and his family finally returned to Kabul and camped out in an old fort just as the Mujahedin were replaced by the Taliban. Cruelty continued, but even after Omar was arbitrarily tortured and imprisoned he retained his hope that things would change for the better. After he was released from prison he secretly set up a carpet weaving business to provide work for neighborhood girls.

This memoir is beautifully written by a young man who has suffered much but still loves his country. I highly recommend Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story.

Posted by Kay.

Memoir of a badly-behaved woman

Storm Large -- who may have the greatest rock-and-roll name of all time -- is well-known in Portland entertainment circles. Frontman of The Balls and frequent guest chanteuse of Pink Martini, she is a versatile singer whose can easily switch styles from heavy metal to torchy ballads. She won rave reviews for starring in Cabaret on Portland Center Stage in 2009, and is widely known for rocking the house on the short-lived reality show Rock Star: Supernova in 2006.


She also just won the Oregon Book Award for her excellent memoir, Crazy Enough, in which she describes the enduring effects of her mother’s mental illness on her life.

Large’s mother, Suzi, displayed aggravating, painful episodes of attention-getting delusions and compulsive lying, interrupted by bouts of suicidal depression. Diagnosed with everything from bipolar disorder to multiple personalities to something called “mental epilepsy,” Suzi was impossible to live with, even for the daughter who adored her.

Large (her family called her “Stormy”) rebelled early and hard, embarking upon a wild career of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. She recounts her adventures, good and sometimes very bad, in this funny, profane, and audacious book.

One of the greatest things about reading Crazy Enough was that it sent me hunting for Large’s performances online. She is remarkably talented.  Here is a clip (from Rock Star: Supernova) of her beautifully performing “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. I can be a harsh critic towards artists who cover songs I love, but I think that is wonderful. If you listen until the end, you’ll hear that she dedicates it to her mother.

If you’re interested in the story of a brilliant, troubled, difficult, and funny woman, check out Crazy Enough: A Memoir.

A girl and her wolf

After escaping from an abusive relationship, Ceiridwen Terrill adopted a female wolfdog puppy she named Inyo. She wanted a wolf/dog mix in part for protection from the abusive guy. But more than that, she wanted a wolfdog because she’d heard they were independent, aloof, still partly wild. Terrill wanted to imbibe a little of that spirit for herself: she would become a free, unfettered creature, only giving love where it was truly deserved.

Turns out, Terrill's reasons for wanting a wolfdog were all the wrong ones.

Terrill’s memoir, Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs, is extremely informative about wolves, dogs, the differences between the two, and the serious challenges faced by people who try to live with wolves as companions.

It’s also an honest and intimate memoir of Terrill’s mistakes. And she makes a lot of mistakes: with men, with the law, and most of all, with Inyo.

Inyo grows from a charmingly precocious puppy into a powerful adult: beautiful, intelligent, independent, and impossible.  Inyo fails obedience classes, escapes constantly, and terrifies neighbors.  Terrill lies to animal control, conceals evidence of destroyed property, gets evicted, and almost ends up homeless.  Eventually, things get violent. Loving a wild creature who simply cannot adapt to a human’s world, and saddled with a charming husband who is not as much help as he could be (to say the least), Terrill’s options dwindle.

Terrill now teaches at Concordia College in Portland, and Part Wild, her first book, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award. I enjoyed the intelligent and well-informed discussion of exactly why wolfdogs (who are, after all, very closely related to dogs) so rarely make good companion animals.

Even more than that, I loved the way the author fearlessly exposes her own bad judgement and desperation, humanizing what could be a dry subject. I shook my head over Terrill’s mistakes, but my heart went out to her, too.

Part Wild is a terrific book. I recommend it if you love dogs, or if you've ever found yourself in a trap of your own making.

Give me everything you have

In Give Me Everything You Have, James Lasdun describes a sustained attack by an obsessed former student. The book is subtitled On Being Stalked.

Lasdun, a novelist and poet, met “Nasreen” in a writing workshop he was leading. He thought her budding novel was good, and he encouraged her. When she emailed him a few years later, asking him to help her find an agent, he agreed.

The friendly email relationship that developed seems to have been perceived as a romance by Nasreen. That
lasted until Lasdun asked her opinion of the middle-eastern custom of veils (Nasreen was of Iranian descent), and she replied with a suggestive, “Would you like to see me in a veil, sir?” Belatedly awakening to the impropriety of the relationship, Lasdun tried to end it.

What followed was a torrent: several emails a day, every day, for years, filled with accusations, delusions, and death-wishes, occasionally interspersed with invitations and supplications.

Nasreen also used the Internet to smear Lasdun's reputation, accusing him of plagiarism and rape in Amazon and Goodreads reviews, editing his Wikipedia page, and sending letters filled with blood-curdling accusations to his employers and colleagues.  Nasreen found a way to use online forms to impersonate Lasdun online, a further assault on his image.

Lasdun’s memoir tells how this sustained and constant stream of abuse transformed his life. He also describes his completely fruitless attempts to stop it. As with other cases of extreme and hateful cyberbullying, there are generally few laws to describe this crime, and few legal methods for stopping it. At the time Lasdun finished his memoir, Nasreen’s unreasoning campaign of hate was still continuing.
It is probably going on even now.

 This book is beautifully-written and completely of the moment: right now, when Internet makes stalking and bullying easy, but the legal infrastructure hasn't found a way to deal with such crimes. Lasdun shows, chillingly, how easily it could happen to anyone.

What an education it was

During an interview on the BBC, well-known British journalist Lynn Barber cheerfully admitted to having slept with more than 50 men during her terms at Oxford. The listening public was shocked, but they shouldn't have been; Barber had already confessed all in a brisk little book called An Education.

In this memoir, Barber describes her lonely childhood and how, when she was still in high school, she was picked up by a charming and sophisticated older man. The flirtation developed into a two-year relationship with a man whose real name she didn't even know. Not only was the young Lynn seduced by him, but her parents were as well; the whole family was devastated by his betrayal.

This portion of the book was made into a very good movie, starring Carey Mulligan.

The movie ends when Lynn's relationship does, but the book goes on - to her adventures at Oxford, her years working for Penthouse Magazine, her unconventional marriage, and the journalism work that eventually landed her the nickname The Demon Barber.

It's a fascinating look at a young woman coming of age during a time when opportunities for women were blossoming - not just career opportunities, but personal ones as well. Lynn Barber certainly took advantage of them.

A book, with drugs

Mike Doughty first gained fame as the lead singer of Soul Coughing, a late-90s band that gained a pretty fierce cult following without quite breaking through to big mainstream success. The band broke up, bitterly, in 2000. Doughty's solo career has consisted of a series of thoughtful albums, quite unlike Soul Coughing in mood and style. In his songs, he often confesses to a sordid past: addictions, women, family problems.I like Doughty's songs; I've been a fan since the 2005 album Haughty Melodic. When I heard that he was writing a memoir, I knew I wanted to read it.

That memoir, The Book of Drugs, takes Doughty's confessional songwriting style a step further. It is a pitiless airing of his worst failings and biggest problems. His description of his lifelong compulsion to lose himself in drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sexual encounters is nothing short of self-lacerating.
The memoir also covers his journey to sobriety. He seems almost bashful about describing his recovery, as though he fears that a healthier life might be inauthentic in a rock star:

"As a teenager, I scoffed at the TV stars in pastel sweaters, on the cover of People magazine, I'm-off-the-drugs-and-high-on-life! But here I was. Off the drugs and high on life. I was awakening to what was around me, and in doing so, realized I'd no idea just how shut off I was. One evening I had the TV on, and the weather man said, 'It was unseasonably cool today.' Yes it was! It was unseasonably cool. I was there!"

Does anyone remember the controversy surrounding James Frey? Frey's addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces was enormously successful and well-reviewed; then the book's fabrications were exposed. I'm pretty sure Doughty remembers that incident. Turning memories into a coherent story is an act of imagination, and Doughty repeatedly reminds us that his memory might be unreliable.The Book of Drugs is the rambling, sometimes-funny, bitterly candid story of one messed-up guy. It's an interesting read; I recommend it.

...For mother will be there

Alexandra Fuller's parents loved Africa. In her memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, she describes her strange and difficult childhood as the daughter of white British farmers in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Fuller's father fought in Rhodesia's long civil war, struggling to keep the country "white-run." They called the opposing fighters, the Africans who wanted to control their country, "terrorists."

"In 1974," she writes, "the Rhodesian civil war was eight years old. In a matter of months, terrorist forces based in Mozambique under the new and guerrilla-friendly Frelimo government would be flooding over the border to Rhodesia to conduct nightly raids, plant land mines, and, they said, chop off the lips and ears and eyelids of little white children."

In 1974, Fuller turned five. I, too, turned five in 1974; we are the same age. While I was growing up in a small American town, Fuller was worrying about having her eyelids cut off. A dental hygienist came to my school to teach us how to brush our teeth properly; Fuller's school was visited by a soldier, who taught them how to avoid land mines. Her mother took an Uzi with her on her daily farming chores; Fuller knew how to strip, clean, load, and fire one by the time she was seven.

The most striking figure in Fuller's memoir has to be her mother, a vivacious and strong-willed woman with a truly devastating drinking problem, who refused to coddle her children and instead exposed them to danger and neglect.


Fuller portrays her parents with love. She also reveals, with unflinching honesty, their unthinking belief that whites should control Africa, that Africans are by nature unfit to do so. As a child, Fuller innocently accepted the racial superiority she was taught; as an adult, her memoir is infused with the knowledge that her parents were, at best, profoundly misguided.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight tells the story of Africa's violent struggle, as seen through the eyes of a child who knows no other world. It's fascinating. Fuller's follow-up, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, was just published in September.

A tiny crunching sound, apparently

In The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey describes how she was, for years, debilitated by a chronic mitochondrial disease. She was too weak to stand or sit up, easily exhausted by visitors, disturbed by loud noises and sudden movements, and very very alone. Then a friend gave Bailey a pot of wild violets, which contained a surprise: a live snail, tiny and brown, hiding beneath the leaves.

The snail's slow, graceful life seemed to match Bailey's. It slept during the day. At night it glided out of the violets and explored, nibbling little holes in Bailey's stationery. Belatedly she realized it was hungry (it wouldn't eat the violets) and put out food for it. Watching it move was both interesting and restful. She could look at it just by turning her head.

Most pets are relatively human-like: social mammals that enjoy companionship and communicate with sounds and gestures. A snail, by contrast, is extremely alien: solitary, hermaphroditic, lacking a skeleton, covered with slime. But Bailey came to feel great respect and admiration for her snail.

(Snails are slimy but equipped with a pretty spiral shell. I wonder if Bailey would have felt the same affection if the animal in her violets had been a slug?)

This memoir is a small book, written in brief snippets. It contains some interesting facts about how these little animals eat, sleep, mate, and defend themselves. It also contains a few details about Bailey's illness. I admit I wanted more snail data, and more information about her disease. It's a quick and graceful read; I suppose it's exactly the sort of book an easily-tired person might write.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is an interesting example of the human-animal connection, and a meditation on the beauty of small, easy-to-overlook things.

Hamlet's Dresser by Bob Smith

Bob Smith's childhood was lonely. His sister, Carolyn, was profoundly disabled; his mother could barely cope. The pressure on young Bobby to be a perfect child, never troublesome or sick, was intense. In this memoir, Smith describes the moment (he was about ten) when a librarian gave him a copy of The Merchant of Venice, and the opening line changed his life: "In sooth I know not why I am so sad."

I read it again. Ten simple monosyllabic words and of course I couldn't know what sooth meant, but it's hardly necessary. It changes nothing in the simple declarative sentence, a sentence that could not more perfectly describe the kid reading it ... I was desperate to lean against something bigger than me, and it was clear that William Shakespeare understood what it's like to ache and not know why.

Smith now teaches Shakespeare at senior centers, taking old people through the plays, and he describes how often Shakespeare's words hit that way: "I see it all the time now. When a phrase ignites the room with some compelling truth I watch people thrill to the confirmation: 'Yes,' they say, 'that's it!'"

Caring for his beloved sister; starching Bert Lahr's shirts and teaching Katherine Hepburn how to buckle armor; struggling with the devout Catholicism of his youth. Smith illustrates the memories of his life with quotations from Shakespeare, ones that make you think, "Yes, that's it." It's one of the most interesting memoirs I've read in a long time.

Check out the book or the CD.

Love is a warm dog

Dog Years by poet Mark Doty is a dog memoir. There are lots of these, the most popular being Marley & Me by John Grogan. I think that Dog Years accomplishes more than most books about our canine friends.

Written in the years following the death of Doty's lover from AIDS and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, it is a meditation upon grief and loss. Doty's relationships with his dogs, Beau and Arden, helped him through these crises; their deaths bereaved him anew. It is a profoundly sad book, one that explores the human-animal bond without sentimentality, but with great tenderness. This passage illustrates the author’s approach:

The old man who lived on my block in Provincetown devised a method to help his ancient springer spaniel walk, when the dog became too old and weak to hold himself up. Antony made a rope harness that he'd slip around Charlie's torso, and he'd haul the old sad sack up, a few inches off the ground, and then the dog could move his legs on his own, and together they'd go for a walk. This always seemed to me a synthesis of love and art; craft found a way, for a while, to keep the beloved other in the world. Love and art -- those two towers can't be knocked down, can they?

No, indeed. If you would like to put a hold on Dog Years, click the picture.