THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own
David Carr
Simon & Schuster
Memoir
ISBN: 9781416541523
If this was just another “junkie memoir,” as David Carr derisively describes the genre of addiction and recovery, it probably wouldn’t be worth the time to follow in his wake as he plumbs the depths of his once troubled life. Instead, this pungent, raw, searingly honest book rises above its peers as it grabs you by the throat and wrestles you to the ground with the force of its narrative and then lifts you up with its redemptive power.
Rather than sit down in front of his computer and attempt to dredge up memories of the past 20 years, like the professional journalist he is, Carr decided to report on his own life. Armed with a video camera, digital tape recorder and an external hard drive, he conducted 60 interviews over a period of three years, checking his often faulty recollection (not surprising considering the massive quantities of cocaine he snorted, smoked and eventually shot) against others’ memories spanning more than 20 years.
The first half of THE NIGHT OF THE GUN recounts in exhaustive and painful detail Carr’s descent into the depths of addiction. Blessedly, he displays not the slightest inclination to romanticize the addict’s life. It’s a desperate search for the next high, as drugs become the dominant feature of his daily existence. And it’s a tale filled with deceit, shame and physical degradation almost too disgusting to contemplate. In 1987-88 alone, Carr was arrested nine times, although he somehow escaped serious consequences for this criminal activity. In the midst of his downward spiral, Carr manages to maintain a semblance of a career as a journalist in Minneapolis. When his first marriage ends after a few years, he falls into another relationship, eventually cheating on that woman with Anna, who gives birth to twin “crack babies” (less than three pounds each at birth), Carr’s precious daughters Erin and Meagan.
Although not nearly as dramatic as the story of his fall, Carr’s account of his painstaking road to regain his family and professional life --- how he made the journey from what he calls “That Guy” to “This Guy” --- is by far the more interesting. “I had to learn to be a man,” Carr concedes, “no pretending involved.” He emerges from six months in rehab (his first as an inpatient and fifth attempt overall) to the realization that as between him and the twins’ mother, herself a drug addict and dealer, he’s the only parent even remotely capable of raising the girls.
With the help of a compassionate lawyer and the support of his family and friends who had been exposed to the worst of his drug and alcohol-soaked excesses, in his mid-30s he begins behaving as an adult for the first time in his life. A bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a serious but temporary setback. In 1995 he marries again and fathers another child, but by 2002 there’s another relapse into alcoholism and an arrest for DUI. “To people who do not have the allergy, there is no clear way to explain the unmanageability that goes with addiction,” he writes. Carr understands the distance he’s traveled, but there’s a sense hovering over this narrative that he recognizes the fragility of his recovery, as if he’s poised on a cliff in jeopardy of pitching forward into oblivion at any moment.
Carr hasn’t crawled his way back from professional oblivion to a job as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times on simply an engaging personality and a unique personal history. His writing crackles with energy and personality, as in this account of the grim beginning of the addict’s typical day: “Mornings for an addict involve waking up in a room where everything implicates him. Even if there is no piss or vomit --- oh, blessed be small wonders --- there is the tipped-over 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.”
The controversy over James Frey’s fictional memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, undoubtedly will cause some to pass on this story of the hard-won lessons that can emerge from even the most dissolute of lives. Resist that urge. This is a masterful work only a writer of David Carr’s considerable skill could have created.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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