Barbarian Haze
I’m mostly reading fiction these days, but I try my best to keep William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days, close to me wherever I go. I call it (to myself, anyway) a Sliced Turkey Book—so named because of an odd childhood belief of mine that eating cold, plain sliced turkey out of the bag whenever I felt down would perk me up. Placebo or not, this usually worked, and so too does cracking open Barbarian Days when I’m in a rut, creative or otherwise. My paperback copy’s been through the wringer; spine lopped out of place, pages frayed and splayed around the edges. Mysterious stains penetrate complete chapters.
The whole book is great, but the most memorable section is a stretch in the middle which describes the author and a buddy roughing it through Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia for a couple years in Finnegan’s mid-twenties. For an ocean-obsessed 22-year-old college senior strapped into online classes in the middle of the pandemic (me), this was as inflammatory a document as you might imagine. Indeed, when I left for my own big trip a few years later, Finnegan came along for the ride.
I’ve taken to browsing random chapters lately before bed (I’m getting antsy!) and I’ve been struck on this last reading by the utter specificity of the author’s memory dating back to his youth. I think I’m pretty good at remembering stuff from childhood, but how can Finnegan possibly recount all this stuff, the color of the sand under his toes on a Hawaiian beach, the shape of a 1981 Fijian surfboard being hauled around by a stranger, from six to sixty?
A good friend of mine who I met on the road1 (he’d also been inspired by Barbarian Days, along with half the young people dotting far-from-home surfing lineups as we speak) recently put it to me well as we were discussing the book: in memoirs which contain so much vivid detail, down to the timing of the sounds people make or their decades-old facial expressions, how do authors manage to keep it all straight? “It seems unlikely,” he wrote to me judiciously, “that somebody would remember all those moments in such precise detail, especially when the memory is decades ago.” It’s a question I myself have been thinking about a lot over the last few weeks flipping through Finnegan’s memoir with a little more perspective.
While my friend is right to point out how preposterous it seems that one could remember, say, the exact face an elementary school teacher made in 1957 from the vantage point of the 21st century, there are a few factors which make such recollections somewhat more plausible for the average memoir author than they would be for the average reader.
The first is that great writers—the kind whose memoirs schlubs like my friend and I are reading, anyway—are very probably lifelong writers, and therefore are more likely than even a well-versed reader to have kept extensive journals dating back to as far as early childhood. Now, you'd be right to question the veracity of these entries—which are undoubtedly marred by the same issues of memory and perspective humans all share—but they often work for painting a decent picture of circumstance or dialogue, which can in turn trigger a more vivid memory.2
The second is adjacent to a point I made a few months ago amidst my analysis of Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker piece on CoComelon: the population pool of writers self-selects for people who are unusually perceptive and observant. These two traits are usually what make writers good at what they do. Because other writers are almost always the ones driving the discourse around literature—through analysis, discussions, reviews, etc.—the particularity of the writer class is so often taken for granted by critics who share the same tendencies creators do. But I can’t emphasize this enough: the vast majority of people don’t think like writers do! (Nor do they care about the many so-called pressing preoccupations of people who consider themselves writers). So I think it’s easy to take for granted how specific and peculiar the process of writing can actually be.
Attempting to step outside this vacuum, I’d argue that the same basic qualities which make, say, Haruki Murukami's fiction so riveting—his obsessive focus on tiny details, blowing some small observation he probably made about Colonel Sanders once into a whole subplot of a pseudo-fantasy novel about a cat murderer and fish falling from the sky—are, essentially, the same traits which make Barbarian Days so compelling. Great authors take things that most people, on some level, notice, and reframe them with their own idiosyncrasies and panache, infusing them with transformative, unforgettably creative flourishes (like how Finnegan describes getting barreled over and over at Honolua Bay as a teenager, a hair-raising experience for even the most extremely land-locked reader).
Now, there are obvious limitations to this. Even given all that writers have going for them in terms of recollection skills—journaling, good memory, etc.—it's impossible that everything Finnegan writes in Barbarian Days actually happened as he claims it did. I mean, come on. He's writing a nearly 400-page book and he's giving it his best shot, but he for sure knows that it can't all have actually went down exactly as he described, and he is absolutely, as my friend hinted at, embellishing lots of details. This fact is baked into the genre.
The only question is how much the writer chooses to discuss this inconvenience out loud. Barbarian Days and a similarly popular memoir, Patti Smith’s Just Kids (the latter having inspired as many East Village apartment overpays as the former has impulsive surf pilgrimages), mostly don't touch the memory question directly; they rarely feature, in other words, warnings like “I remember this happening but..." or "in my mind it went like this..." to qualify individual stories. Others do (ironically, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, written in the style of a memoir, features qualifiers like "I remember it being like this”—but of course she’s(?) made it all up. Probably). I don't think one strategy is more effective than the other, though using qualifiers can get tricky because if you start going down that road then suddenly stop using disclaimers in telling a particular story, the reader is more likely to assume said story is true, which, well, who knows. You can see how this gets messy in a hurry.
Ultimately, the memoir question comes down to the reliability of memory, in every form—be it journal writing, oral history, or plain, old-fashioned internal recollection—and this issue (issue, not necessarily problem) will always be at the core of the memoir genre, just as, often, the inverse challenge arises in fiction (authors putting too much auto in autofiction). Personally, I think it'd be helpful to deconstruct these genre types a bit as readers, to care less about the purported category of a work and to just appreciate each one under the broader category of "art” while remaining mindful of each creation’s context. That's easy for me to say, though; I've never been on the wrong end of it, in the case of someone falsely and maliciously writing something “true” about me, which is also something that happens (not to mention the political weaponization of the genre—Barack Obama and J.D. Vance have both faced criticism over the veracity of their respective memoirs, each of which launched them to fame).
Political controversies aside, the crux of this question is essentially the foundation of all I'm interested in tackling as a writer; where does what we believe come from? How reliable are our memories, and is it useful to lean on them to shape who we strive to be in the future? I aim for all the writing I do to elicit questions like those, and I appreciate the way great memoirs summon them without explicitly referencing them by funneling memory, dream, and reality through a singular, somehow honest prism. I don't think anyone should read these works with the expectation that everything inside is 100 percent true, because, well, what would that even mean? A "true" recounting of a life, after all, is an oxymoron, even and especially when the recounter is yourself. The reader, as always, gets the final word on how he or she chooses to interpret any piece of writing, genre be damned.
Shoutout Eric, who himself wrote very groovily for Supernuclear last year about his experience living communally in Barbados.
This is, indirectly, how I arrived at the opening scene of a personal essay I wrote last year. In the middle of formulating it, I had a shower curtain malfunction in my apartment, which reminded me of a similar incident in high school when a friend didn’t understand how the shower curtain worked in a San Diego hotel on a school trip, which got me thinking of that trip, which led me to the memory which ended up shaping the entire piece.
This was bloody awesome