It’s Only Drowning

A book by David Litt

FRESH RELEASE

It’s Only Drowning was released on June 24, 2025. This title is available to purchase now.

 It’s Only Drowning  Release Date: June 24, 2025

It’s Only Drowning

It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
$29.99 $16.91
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11/14/2025 03:38 pm GMT

After moving from Washington, D.C. to the Jersey Shore a former speechwriter for President Obama starts surfing at the age of thirty-five—the rough equivalent of beginning guitar lessons on your deathbed—and must turn for help to the only other surfer he knows: a tattooed, truck-driving, Joe Rogan super-fan who happens to be his brother-in-law.

David Litt, the Yale-educated writer with a sensible fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with two motorcycles and a passion for death metal, had always coexisted from a comfortable distance as brothers-in-law. Yet in 2021, as David wallowed in existential dread while America’s crises piled up, he noticed Matt was thriving. When he wasn’t making money rewiring New Jersey beach homes, Matt was riding waves at his favorite spots in the state.

Quietly, David started taking surfing lessons. For a few months he suffered through wipeouts on waves the height of daffodils. But to his surprise he soon became obsessed. And once he got a sense of the ways that fully committing to surfing could change him both in water and on land, he set his sights on an unlikely goal: riding a big wave at Hawaii’s famously dangerous North Shore. To get there he’d need Matt’s help.

At a moment when the fault lines of class, education, and culture threaten to tear America apart, It’s Only Drowning is a blueprint for becoming braver at a time when it takes courage just to read the news, a love letter to surfing in the vein of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, and a poignant buddy comedy in the tradition of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
$29.99 $16.91
Buy Now
We earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
11/14/2025 03:38 pm GMT

Genre:  Nonfiction 

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