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Summary
Summary
"In one sense, my story is a common one, a white boy misdemeanant who lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding and a support group that will go unnamed. But if the whole truth is told, it does not end there. "The book will be fundamentally different than a tell-all, or more commonly, tell-most. It will be a rigorously clear-eyed reported memoir in which the process of discovery will be part of the narrative motor...For instance, my brother asked if I was going to give him credit for bailing me out after I was arrested for possession of pot as an 18-yr.-old in a Wisconsin state park. I had not even remembered the incident. "You remember the story you can live with, not the one that happened."
Author Notes
David Carr was born on September 8, 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received degrees in psychology and journalism from the University of Minnesota. He worked for an alternative weekly, Twin Cities Reader, and the Washington City Paper, before moving to New York. He wrote about media for a website, Inside.com, and was a contributing writer for publications including The Atlantic Monthly and New York magazine. He joined The New York Times in 2002 as a business reporter covering magazine publishing. He wrote about cultural subjects for The Times including the feature known as The Carpetbagger and a column entitled The Media Equation. His book, The Night of the Gun, was published in 2008 and dealt with the time in his life when he was addicted to crack cocaine. He died on February 12, 2015 at the age of 58.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
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.
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
New York Review of Books 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.
Kirkus 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.
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.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Gun Play Sure as a gun. -- Don Quixote The voice came from a long distance off, like a far-flung radio signal, all crackle and mystery with just an occasional word coming through. And then it was as if a hill had been crested and the signal locked. The voice was suddenly clear. "You can get up from this chair, go to treatment, and keep your job. There's a bed waiting for you. Just go," said the editor, a friendly guy, sitting behind the desk. "Or you can refuse and be fired." Friendly but firm. The static returned, but now he had my attention. I knew about treatment -- I had mumbled the slogans, eaten the Jell-O, and worn the paper slippers, twice. I was at the end of my monthlong probation at a business magazine in Minneapolis; it had begun with grave promises to reform, to show up at work like a normal person, and I had almost made it. But the day before, March 17, 1987, was Saint Patrick's Day. Obeisance was required for my shanty Irish heritage. I twisted off the middle of the workday to celebrate my genetic loading with green beer and Jameson Irish whiskey. And cocaine. Lots and lots of coke. There was a van, friends from the office, and a call to some pals, including Tom, a comedian I knew. We decided to attend a small but brave Saint Patrick's Day parade in Hopkins, Minnesota, the suburban town where I grew up. My mother made the parade happen through sheer force of will. She blew a whistle, and people came. There were no floats, just a bunch of drunk Irish-for-a-days and their kids, yelling and waving banners to unsuspecting locals who set up folding chairs as if there were going to be a real parade. After we walked down Main Street accompanied only by those sad little metal noisemakers, we all filed into the Knights of Columbus hall. The adults did standup drinking while the kids assembled for some entertainment. I told my mom that Tom the comedian had some good material for the kids. He immediately began spraying purple jokes in all directions and was wrestled off the stage by a few nearby adults. I remember telling my mom we were sorry as we left, but I don't remember precisely what happened after that. I know we did lots of "more." That's what we called coke. We called it more because it was the operative metaphor for the drug. Even if it was the first call of the night, we would say, "You got any more?" because there would always be more -- more need, more coke, more calls. After the Knights of Columbus debacle -- it was rendered as a triumph after we got in the van -- we went downtown to McCready's, an Irish bar in name only that was kind of a clubhouse for our crowd. We had some more, along with shots of Irish whiskey. We kept calling it "just a wee taste" in honor of the occasion. The shot glasses piled up between trips to the back room for line after line of coke, and at closing time we moved to a house party. Then the dreaded walk home accompanied by the chirping of birds. That's how it always went, wheeling through bars, selling, cadging, or giving away coke, drinking like a sailor and swearing like a pirate. And then somehow slinking into work as a reporter. Maybe it took a line or two off the bottom of the desk drawer to achieve battle readiness in the morning, but hey, I was there, wasn't I? On the day I got fired -- it would be some time before I worked again -- I was on the last vapors of a young career that demonstrated real aptitude. Even as I was getting busy with the coke at night, I was happy to hold the cops and government officials to account in my day job. Getting loaded, acting the fool, seemed like a part of the job description, at least the way I did it. Editors dealt with my idiosyncrasies -- covering the city council in a bowling shirt and red visor sunglasses -- because I was well sourced in what was essentially a small town and wrote a great deal of copy. I saw my bifurcated existence as the best of both worlds, no worries. But now that mad run seemed to be over. I sat with my hands on the arms of the chair that suddenly seemed wired with very strong current. There was no time to panic, but the panic came anyway. Holy shit. They are on to me. The editor prodded me gently for an answer. Treatment or professional unallotment? For an addict the choice between sanity and chaos is sometimes a riddle, but my mind was suddenly epically clear. "I'm not done yet." Things moved quickly after that. After a stop at my desk, I went down the elevator and out into a brutally clear morning. Magically, my friend Paul was walking down the street in front of my office building, looking ravaged in a leather coat and sunglasses. He hadn't even beaten the birds home. I told him I had just been fired, which was clinically true but not the whole story. A folk singer of significant talent and many virulent songs about the wages of working for The Man, Paul understood immediately. He had some pills of iffy provenance -- neither he nor I knew much about pills -- maybe they were muscle relaxers. I ate them. Freshly, emphatically fired, I was suffused with a rush of sudden liberation. A celebration was in order. I called Donald, my trusty wingman. A pal from college, he was tall, dark, and compliant, a boon companion once he got a couple of pops in him. We had first met at a crappy state college in Wisconsin, where we tucked dozens of capers under our belts. We had been washed down a mountain in the Smokies inside a tent, created a campfire out of four stacked picnic tables at Wolf River, and casually taken out picket fences and toppled mailboxes during road trips all over Wisconsin. Our shared taste for skipping classes in lieu of hikes, Frisbee, and dropping acid during college had been replaced by new frolics once we both moved on to Minneapolis. We worked restaurant jobs, pouring and downing liquor, spending the ready cash as fast as it came in. "Make some calls!" became the warm-up line for many a night of grand foolishness. We shared friends, money, and, once, a woman named Signe, a worldly cocktail waitress who found herself wanly amused by the two guys tripping on acid one night at closing time at a bar called Moby Dick's. "Let me know when you boys are finished," she said in a bored voice as Donald and I grinned madly at each other from either end of her. We didn't care. He was a painter and photographer when he wasn't getting shit faced. And at a certain point, I became a journalist when I wasn't ingesting all the substances I could get my hands on. We were a fine pair. Now that I had been fired for cause, there was no doubt that Donald would know what to say. "Fuck 'em," he said when he met me at McCready's to toast my first day between opportunities. The pills had made me a little hinky, but I shook it off with a snort of coke. Nicely prepped, we went to the Cabooze, a Minneapolis blues bar. Details are unclear, but there was some sort of beef inside, and we were asked to leave. Donald complained on the way out that I was always getting us 86'd, and my response included throwing him across the expansive hood of his battered '75 LTD. Seeing the trend, he drove away, leaving me standing with thirty-four cents in my pocket. That detail I remember. I was pissed: Not about losing my job -- they'd be sorry. Not about getting 86'd -- that was routine. But my best friend had abandoned me. I was livid, and somebody was going to get it. I walked the few miles back to McCready's to refuel and called Donald at home. "I'm coming over." Hearing the quiet menace in my voice, he advised me against it; that he had a gun. "Oh really? Now I'm coming over for sure." He and his sister Ann Marie had a nice rental on Nicollet Avenue in a rugged neighborhood on the south side of Minneapolis, not far from where I lived. I don't remember how I got there, but I stormed up to the front door -- a thick one of wood and glass -- and after no one answered, I tried kicking my way in. My right knee started to give way before my sneaker did any damage. Ann Marie, finally giving in to the commotion, came to the door and asked me what I was going to do if I came in. "I just want to talk to him." Donald came to the door and, true to his word, had a handgun at his side. With genuine regret on his face, he said he was going to call the cops. I had been in that house dozens of times and knew the phone was in his bedroom. I limped around the corner and put my fist through the window, grabbed the phone, and held it aloft in my bloody arm. "All right, call 'em, motherfucker! Call 'em! Call the goddamn cops!" I felt like Jack Fucking Nicholson. Momentarily impressed, Donald recovered long enough to grab the phone out of my bloody hand and do just that. When we met again through the glass of the front door, he still had the gun, but his voice was now friendly. "You should leave. They're coming right now." I looked down Nicollet toward Lake Street and saw a fast-moving squad car with the cherries lit, no siren. I wasn't limping anymore. I had eight blocks to go to my apartment, full tilt all the way. Off the steps, 'round the house, and into the alleys. Several squads were crisscrossing. What the hell did Donald tell them ? I thought as I sprinted. I dove behind a Dumpster to avoid one squad coming around the corner, opening up a flap of jeans and skin on my other knee. I had to hit the bushes and be very still as the cops strafed the area with their searchlights, but I made it, scurrying up the back steps to my apartment in a fourplex on Garfield Avenue. I was bleeding, covered in sweat, and suddenly very hungry. I decided to heat up some leftover ribs, turned the oven on high, and left the door of it open so I could smell the ribs when they heated up. And then I passed out on my couch. Every hangover begins with an inventory. The next morning mine began with my mouth. I had been baking all night, and it was as dry as a two-year-old chicken bone. My head was a small prison, all yelps of pain and alarm, each movement seeming to shift bits of broken glass in my skull. My right arm came into view for inspection, caked in blood, and then I saw it had a few actual pieces of glass still embedded in it. So much for metaphor. My legs both hurt, but in remarkably different ways. Three quadrants in significant disrepair -- that must have been some night, I thought absently. Then I remembered I had jumped my best friend outside a bar. And now that I thought about it, that was before I tried to kick down his door and broke a window in his house. And then I recalled, just for a second, the look of horror and fear on his sister's face, a woman I adored. In fact, I had been such a jerk that my best friend had to point a gun at me to make me go away. Then I remembered I'd lost my job. It was a daylight waterfall of regret known to all addicts. It can't get worse, but it does. When the bottom arrives, the cold fact of it all, it is always a surprise. Over fiteen years, I had made a seemingly organic journey from pothead to party boy, from knockaround guy to friendless thug. At thirty-one, I was washed out of my profession, morally and physically corrupt, but I still had almost a year left in the Life. I wasn't done yet. In the pantheon of "worst days of my life," getting fired was right up there, but I don't remember precisely how bad it was. You would think that I would recall getting canned with a great deal of acuity. But it was twenty years ago. Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present. But 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 as a reporter and columnist for The New York Times . Connecting the two will take a lot more than typing. The first-date version of my story would suggest that I took a short detour into narcotics, went through an aberrant period of buying, selling, snorting, smoking, and finally shooting cocaine, and once I knocked that off, well, all was well. The meme of abasement followed by salvation is a durable device in literature, but does it abide the complexity of how things really happened? Everyone is told just as much as he needs to know, including the self. In Notes from Underground , Fyodor Dostoevsky explains that recollection -- memory, even -- is fungible, and often leaves out unspeakable truths, saying, "Man is bound to lie about himself." I am not an enthusiastic or adept liar. Even so, can I tell you a true story about the worst day of my life? No. To begin with, it was far from the worst day of my life. And those who were there swear it did not happen the way I recall, on that day and on many others. And if I can't tell a true story about one of the worst days of my life, what about the rest of those days, that life, this story? Nearly twenty years later, in the summer of 2006, I sat in a two-room shack in Newport, a town outside of the Twin Cities, near the stockyards where Donald now lived and worked at a tree farm. He was still handsome, still a boon companion. We hadn't seen each other in years, but what knit us together -- an abiding bond hatched in reckless glory -- was in the room with us. I told him the story about the Night of the Gun. He listened carefully and patiently, taking an occasional swig out of a whiskey bottle and laughing at the funny parts. He said it was all true, except the part about the gun. "I never owned a gun," he said. "I think you might have had it." This is a story about who had the gun. Copyright (c) 2008 by David Carr Excerpted from The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own by David Carr All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
