Review by New York Times Review
BEFORE David Carr was the widely read media columnist for The New York Times's Monday business section, he was a cokehead and an alcoholic. He's now written a memoir about how he got from there to here, only he didn't just write it - he also reported it, as best he could. To take one example: What really happened that night after a wedding when Carr yanked his buddy Ralph headfirst out of a town car and tossed him into a flower bed, and the subsequent hotel room brawl had to be broken up by security? "I don't know," Ralph verbally shrugs when Carr puts the question to him two decades later. "You're asking one guy who is drunk and stoned if his memory matches the other guy's who's drunk and stoned." In that conundrum lie both the genius and a primary flaw of this brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book. As you may know - as you definitely know if you work someplace like Condé Nast or Viacom - Carr is also a culture reporter and the keeper of The Times's Carpetbagger blog, covering the annual Oscar race with an eye at once eager and jaundiced, which is pretty much the beau ideal for a journalist He's an inventive reporter (meaning he digs up offbeat stories and has an original eye for detail, not that he's a fabulist), and his prose has a cocky zest that makes you think he love's his job. He brings that same joie de travailler to the grimmer task of covering his own life. Back in the 1980s, when he was a reporter for an alternative weekly in Minneapolis and later for a local business monthly, Carr had a cocaine problem that spiraled downward from snorting to smoking to injecting. He also drank too much, did some low-level dealing and was arrested innumerable times. He did worse things, too, like beating up girlfriends and fathering twin girls whom he and the mother were in no way prepared to take care of. But as you'd guess from the fact that he's still alive and making money legally, things got better: after a few false starts he finally stuck with rehab, got his life together, raised his girls as a single dad, saw his career take off, found a good woman to marry and have another daughter with, started drinking again, committed anew to sobriety and wrote this book. In broad strokes this isn't a new or unique story, as readers of James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, Caroline Knapp and the tabloids know, and as Carr does himself: "Beyond the grime that is bound to accrue from a trip through the gutters of one's past, what is the value in one more addiction memoir to me or anyone else?" For Carr, what justified its writing is that, as the title implies, he has taken on the truth of his own story the way he would any other: buttressing his memories or countering them, as the case may be - with police reports, legal documents, medical records and, most important, interviews he taped with 60 friends, family members, fellow cokeheads and dealers. "It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise," Carr writes, "a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me." As a writer and thus a fellow narcissist, I can only say: "Why didn't I think of that?" The book gets its title from an evening gone even more wrong than most, when Carr remembers being in such a rage that a close friend drew a gun on him; after reporting the incident out, he realizes to his mortification that it was he, more crazed than he knew, who drew the gun on his friend. "If I can't tell a true story about one of the worst days of my life," he asks, "what about the rest of those days, that life, this story?" But to the extent that "The Night of the Gun" means to be a meditation on the inherent unreliability of memory and the way, more deliberately, we reweave our messy lives into palatable histories, the insights will be familiar to anyone who has seen "Rashomon" or committed sins of omission in a job interview. And as epic bender runs into epic bender, as a convertible winds up in a swamp during one road trip and lines of coke are snorted off the hood of a truck on another, details blur for the reader, too. I don't know about you, but for me, stories about other people's partying wear thin real quick. Unless maybe the other people are Led Zeppelin. (I read the opening chapters of this book on a Long Island Rail Road car full of Fire Islanders loudly planning their weekend Jell-O-shot regimens - Sensurround!) A deeper problem with the book is that the people in Carr's life, and Carr himself, come alive only in fits and starts. This may be due in part to Carr's scrupulousness as a writer and reporter; in the same way that a bad relationship can look better in the rearview mirror, the absence of novelistic license here makes you realize why "surgically enhanced" nonfiction is rewarded on the best-seller list. I prefer nonfiction to be true, too, but let's grant that writers with a bent more literary than literal do have a knack for creating lively characters and vibrant scenes. I can't help thinking that another reason for the book's flatness may be addiction itself. For one thing, a junkie's existence, consumed with copping, is monotonous by definition, life in a hamster cage writ larger and more squalid. Second, addiction is of course a disease, not a character trait or a psychological flaw, and it's a disease that consumes its host - a body and soul snatcher or, in Carr's metaphor, something "more like possession, a death grip from Satan that requires supernatural intervention." Addicts still have psyches, though, and Carr seems either unwilling or uninterested in exploring his and others' - and this to me is the book's Achilles' heel. Of his first, nonsober marriage, he writes, "No one can really explain why I married her, including me." Of a subsequent and sometimes violent relationship, he notes, "part of the reason I was so frantic, so brutal, was that I was obsessed with her." That's almost a tautology. And what's with hitting women? Carr presents this as another aspect of his coke-fueled mania, but plenty of crackheads don't smack their wives and girlfriends. Where does Carr's anger come from? He deplores his behavior but he doesn't bore into it. His father, we learn in passing, had his own problems with alcohol, as did some of Carr's siblings. How did this affect Carr growing up? Does he ever curse or at least resent his inheritance? He doesn't say. Maybe he chalks it all up to nature, to original sin. Or maybe he's just discreet, which is laudable. But then, don't write a memoir. No reader will doubt the struggle behind Carr's efforts to get and stay sober, or fail to feel joy when he rights himself, though in the telling this part of the book feels pat (For writers, happy is hard.) What Carr excels at, where his gifts as a journalist shine, is explaining how an addict's life works, the economics of it, the ad-hoc social web, the quotidian feel of the thing: "Mornings for an addict involve waking up in a room where everything implicates him," Carr writes. "There is the tippedover bottle, the smashed phone, the bright midday light coming through the rip in the shade that says another day has started without you. Drunks and addicts tend to build nests out of the detritus of their misbegotten lives. "It is that ecosystem, all there for the inventorying within 20 seconds of waking, which tends to make addiction a serial matter. Apart from the progression of the disease, if you wake up in that kind of hell, you might start looking for something to take the edge off ... to help you reframe your little disaster area. Hmmm, just a second here. A little hair of the dog. Yep. Now, that's better. Everything is new again." That's a great passage, an essay in urban typology worthy of Balzac at his keenest (and least windy). I just wish I had a better sense of what being a crackhead felt like specifically for Carr. As a nonaddict, I honor his sobriety, to use the current political formulation; but I also wish he had revealed more of his tortured, tenacious soul. 'You're asking one guy who is drunk and stoned if his memory matches the other guy's who's drunk and stoned.' Brace Handy, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is a writer and deputy editor at Vanity Fair.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the midst of his life of drug-induced mayhem, Carr visited a friend one night and threatened him with violence. A gun was involved, but did Carr threaten his friend with the gun, or did his friend threaten use of the gun in self-defense? To answer that question and hundreds of others, Carr unwilling to rely on his iffy memory used the tools of journalism to recount his past. He interviewed dealers, fellow addicts, women he had dated, employers, friends; he checked police reports and medical records. What he found was a personal history at times much uglier than he remembered. What he also found were redeeming moments: he was a good parent to his twin daughters, once he sobered up and got custody from their equally drug-addled mother, and he was a very talented writer with a career worth saving. He went on to an illustrious career at several alternative newspapers and the New York Times, all the while hanging on to the hard-learned and re-learned lessons of drug and alcohol addiction. This is a harrowing tale, brutally honest and more insightful and revealing than the standard drug-addict memoir.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An intriguing premise informs Carr's memoir of drug addiction--he went back to his hometown of Minneapolis and interviewed the friends, lovers and family members who witnessed his downfall. A successful, albeit hard-partying, journalist, Carr developed a taste for coke that led him to smoke and shoot the drug. At the height of his use in the late 1980s, his similarly addicted girlfriend gave birth to twin daughters. Carr, now a New York Times columnist, gives both the lowlights of his addiction (the fights, binges and arrests) as well as the painstaking reconstruction of his life. Soon after he quit drugs, he was thrown for another loop when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately, the book is less a real investigation of his life than an anecdotal chronicle of wild behavior. What's more, his clinical approach (he videotaped all his interviews), meant to create context, sometimes distances readers from it. By turns self-consciously prurient and intentionally vague, Carr tends to jump back and forth in time within the narrative, leaving the book strangely incoherent. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Carr exhumes a past life that involved numerous criminal offenses, general mayhem, and lots of cocaine. However, unlike most addiction memoirs, he doesn't start with a "this is how I remember it" disclaimer; rather, the book is based on years of exhaustive research via medical and legal documents and interviews with his former acquaintances, creating a tone of objective reportage. The early chapters are particularly engrossing, as Carr explains how he is trying to reconcile his former, malevolent self with his current, highly successful one as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times. He writes, "My past does not connect to my present. There was That Guy, a dynamo of hilarity and then misery, and then there is This Guy, the one with a family, a house, and a good job." The interviews are fascinating: Carr had a completely different recollection of events than, say, Doolie, a loyal girlfriend whom he repeatedly abused. The epic stories of his years as an addict are both entertaining and deeply disturbing. Aside from small flaws like problems with the time line, this is an original, honest, and incredibly moving contribution to the genre. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08.]--Elizabeth Brinkley, Granite Falls, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
New York Times reporter Carr bluntly reveals his former life in hell, when he juggled two talents: smoking crack and filing news. It started out with innocent teenage pot smoking, typical stuff for a suburban Minneapolis kid in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, having cultivated a colossal cocaine habit, the author had deteriorated into a ghost of himself. He was in and out of jail cells and rehab; his legend grew in the streets; his reputation sank to no-hire status in local newsrooms. He got involved with "Anna," a cute blonde drug dealer: "Six months after we had gotten together, her business was in disarray, I had lost my job, and then, oh yeah, she was pregnant." Their twin daughters were born on April 15, 1988, two-and-a-half months premature, each weighing less than three pounds. "When Anna's water broke," Carr writes, "I had just handed her a crack pipe." Soon he was using cocaine intravenously and fell into paranoia and depravity that made even his dealers shake their heads. With the help of family and friends, he did an about-face, putting the seven-month-old twins in foster care and throwing himself into recovery. When Anna continued using, he sued for and got permanent custody. He worked his way to the top of the masthead of the local alt-weekly newspaper, winning awards and providing a stable home for his daughters. But as Carr reminds the reader, with every new height a recovering addict reaches, the bottom is just a short slip away. Perhaps in response to the Million Little Pieces scandal, or perhaps because he doesn't trust his subjective and drug-warped memory, the author provides backup and other points of view for every phase of his life. His book is based on dozens of recently taped interviews with everyone from his parents to drug dealers, and it includes photocopies of arrest reports, clinical observations and even rejection letters from national editors. A brilliantly written, brutally honest memoir. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
