Swellnet: It's gonna be a big week, your book on Tom is released today.
Nick Carroll: Yeah, at first I didn't wanna do the book at all. For most of our lives, for all of our surfing lives, I've sort of been cast as a supporter, an enabler, or even a curator, of my little brother's legend, you know? Both as a journalist and someone involved with pro surfing. It hasn't always sat well with me.

It didn't seem to me that you wrote much about Tom through your career.
No, I didn't, that's true. I didn't write much about Tom because I was a bit too close to him to make a sound judgement in the context of the surfing going on at the time. Like, there were plenty of other people giving Tom huge raps, you know? It wasn't necessary for me to do that also.

A couple of times I was pulled up, actually. I got pulled up by MR once. It was in the early-80s and he thought I was favouring Tom a bit too much. I was writing for Tracks at the time, and, being MR, he wrote me this, I don't know, very fair, even-handed, intelligent letter where he said, I think you're straying a little too far off this. It's not fair to you and it's not fair to any of us, just so you're aware that's my perception. And I went, wow! OK...I figured anything MR says goes, whatever you say MR! It gave me a chance to look at it a bit.

After that, no, I didn't really write that much about Tom. Like I said, I just felt too close to him and it was sort of, like something in the back of my head said it was something I'd do later on.

Now you've written quite a lot about him. When did you first have the idea for the book?
OK, well back in 2011, Tom hadn't reached a totally safe zone. I don't think people that have addiction issues, such as Tom has, they don't ever become safe from it. But he'd got to a point where he felt safer and so his agent, Nick Fordham, said why don't you do a book? Tom and I discussed it, and Tom's a really good photographer, and I thought, fuck, we should do a book of Toms photos! I'll write all the captions.

The publisher involved, Alison Urqhuart from Random House, sort of looked at it and reared back a bit. Alison is a very tough cookie, she reared back, said it would be all nice and that but it wont sell any copies. She was perfectly right, of course.

So I was like yeah, fair enough. And then Nick, he's also managed Andrew Johns in the past and I think he was behind Joey's football hero redemption book that came out a while ago. Nick thought that that's what this book would be like. But I thought, I can't do it, I don't want to know about a book like that. The whole subject is too close, I have too much knowledge to write some typical surf biography ghostwritten job...you know what they're like Stu.

Yeah, I know what they're like.
So I didn't want to write the book for a while. I had to really think about it. I started thinking if I cant write that book then what is this book supposed to be? Is it supposed to tell the absolute fucking truth about everything? Is that what I'm supposed to demand of Tom and myself and our family? At that point I went, fuck, I've kinda got to do it, I've got no choice.

Yet I didn't want to do it where I was this servant of Tom's legend. I'm really wary about that...because I honestly don't know how much I enabled Tom's drug use. I don't know how much of my caution around him over the years, and my desire to protect him actually enabled him.

There's a recurring line in the book, it's your voice speaking, saying “I never write about the drugs.” In hindsight, should you have written about them?
Um, I don't know. It's a bit too judgemental for me that one. What would you do? You've got a brother, are you gonna fuck him over for your own journalistic ambitions? What would you do..?

It's a tough call.
Yeah, when I was writing the book I kept thinking, well, should I have? That's why I kept saying that line through the book. Like, look at me, I'm not writing about the drugs. I'm deeply critical of myself as a journalist in that way. But you know, I'm not that kind of person, I cant do it, I couldn’t do it.

In part, the book is a story of redemption – TC's redemption – but do you feel in any way redeemed now that you've written the truth?
Redeemed?

Yeah, you were just questioning if you did a good job all those years because you didn't write about the drugs, and now you have. So, do you feel redeemed? Have you restored yourself?
Well, first thing is I don't think it's a question of right or wrong, Stu. It's a story about us and our family and about surfing and the surfing culture that we grew up in, and how all those things panned out. I think it's a real luxury to write a book about it that's open like that. I kinda think it works well to have the voices go back and forth between me and Tom 'cause I dunno if one voice could bear the weight of the subject matter.

That was a good device. Having the voices go back and forth, sometimes conspiratorial or questioning, always intimate.
That's what allowed me to write the book, having those voices bring some tension into the narrative. You can kinda feel the differences in voice. Tom, you know, he's got this quaint way of saying things. His spoken voice, it's kinda arcane in a way. He says things and you go, did he really say that? Whereas me when I write I'm pretty clear. The voice is quite hard on the surface but underneath you can tell I'm sort of seething a bit.

You see, Tom's the cool brother and I'm the hot headed brother. I'm the one who should've been the addict!

As an older brother you looked after him a lot. How did you find out that the warning phone call to Jamie, the good time guy at Quiksilver, was answered by Tom?
Tom told me this not so long ago. It was not long after he got out of rehabilitation and we started talking about the things that have gone on over the years. I told him about this heavy phone call I'd made and he said, yeah, that was me on the other end. You could've knocked me over with a feather. I was like OH FUCK, REALLY? That was a piece of plot gold right there....

One last thing, Nick: drugs have been perceived as a touchstone for the ills of pro surfing, and now you've bought into the whole topic. How do you think it will be received by the surf community?
I don't know...but I very much hope that when people read this book they will see it for what it is - which is a personal story. Yeah, I think there are definitely links in between Tom's drug issues and the footloose surf culture of the 70s and 80s and the normalisation of drug use, but I don't think that's the most powerful influence on things for Tom. I think far more powerful are the personal aspects of the story. There's no soapbox involved in this book at all.

TC by Tom & Nick Carroll is published by Random House.
Photo of Nick taken by Tom Carroll.