The Most Fun Thing
Dispatches from a Skateboard Life
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Southwest Review • Electric Literature
Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old.
In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.
What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?
Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy—and what it continues to teach him as he strugglesto find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heady memoir, Beachy (The Slide), cohost of the skateboarding podcast Vent City, volleys from the intricacies of skateboarding technique and the sport's history to reflections on his faltering marriage. Echoing Dostoyevsky's underground man, Beachy writes that as a 41-year-old man, skateboarding "continues to fill a necessary if difficult-to-name void." In existential essays that chronicle his life from 2010 to 2020, he details elaborate boarding tricks—including Belgian pro Youness Amrani's "backside noseblunt and kickflip manny that... earns points for thoughtful homage to Messrs"—and meditates on techniques that, for him, reflect human nature: some moves illustrate caution, some commitment, some risk. He also weaves in stories about his wife, K, and the love and "fury" they've weathered throughout their relationship: "A big challenge of marriage... is how you will continue, always, to know yourself better than your spouse does." For Beachy, the "sacred" act of skateboarding helps him move through his struggles, as well as space, time, and the "rhythm and harmony," disharmony, and excess that come with it. The book never lives up to its title—there's not much humor or fun to be found—but Beachy's search for meaning is thought-provoking nonetheless.
