It was a short piece on Nicaragua, but it put his foot in the door and someone told him that if he wanted to write longer pieces, he needed to propose them now. “You write about a period where you felt useless and if you feel like you got it right, it doesn’t feel like it was so useless.”įinnegan sold his first article to the New Yorker in the 1980s.
“In a way, writing about it was trying to justify all this time spent doing it,” he said. Speaking on Wednesday afternoon at the New York public library’s Books at Noon program, Finnegan discussed the challenge of memoir, the technical challenge of describing waves, and Barbarian Days as an attempt to make meaning out of a hobby he has long been reluctant to divulge. Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer since 1987, calls the book his “coming out” as a surfer, someone who found himself returning to the waves every time he wanted to turn away. Though this inspiration came immediately, it then took him 20 years to finish that project, a book called Barbarian Days: A Surfing Memoir that won this year’s Pulitzer prize for biography or autobiography. William Finnegan had the story idea that would become his Pulitzer-winning memoir when he was forced to come up with suggestions on the spot to impress an editor.
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