Here at The Free Press, we believe in loving thy neighbor. And this week, in which we celebrate the birth of our nation, is perhaps the best reminder that Americans can work together, even when we have wildly different habits and diverging beliefs. So it’s our pleasure to share an excerpt from a brand-new memoir, by onetime Barack Obama speechwriter David Litt—who thought he and his truck-driving, Joe Rogan-listening, vaccine skeptical brother-in-law had absolutely nothing in common. Until they started surfing together. —The Editors
About a year ago, I told my brother-in-law that I was turning in a new draft of the book I’d written about us.
“It’s still mostly about surfing together,” I said. “But I’m also going to talk about the times things between us got tense.”
There was a brief silence.
“Oh,” he said, a touch warily. “Are you going to write about the frozen pizza?”
Matt and I have no shortage of topics to disagree about. He’s a pickup truck-driving electrician who lives in Brick, the blue-collar heart of New Jersey’s small but passionate Trump country. (He refers to his town, proudly, as “Bricktucky.”) I’m a former Obama speechwriter who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a family of proud Democrats, went to Yale, and then started working at the White House at age 24. We don’t see eye-to-eye on tattoos or music or voting or Joe Rogan or vaccines.
Still, it was frozen pizza that was the subject of our fiercest disagreement. That’s one thing on which, ironically, we agree.