The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own [Hardcover]

David Carr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2008

"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."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: "There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth." David Carr's riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can't write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader's trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it's hard to love David Carr--sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it--will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls--makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st Simon & Schuster Hardcover edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416541527
• ISBN-13: 978-1416541523
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (191 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Special Needs
  • #92 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > Mid Atlantic

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars David Carr turns the gun on himself -- and lives to tell the harrowing tale, July 27, 2008

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own (Hardcover)

"Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a guy threw himself under a crosstown bus and lived to tell the tale," David Carr writes. "Is that a book you'd like to read?"

Good question. Indeed, it's the question that prospective readers of "The Night of the Gun", Carr's warts-and-all memoir, will have to consider --- because this is that book.

Consider:

A talented kid without much direction graduates from high school pot smoking to cocaine at college.

He starts a career in journalism that has him reporting on police and government officials by day --- and freebasing cocaine at night.

He hooks up with a woman who deals dope. Driving to see her, he's so wrecked he almost crashes into a station wagon filled with kids. He skids into a ditch, has to spend the night in jail, misses his girlfriend's birthday. When he finally shows up, he gives her what can't be bought in any store: a black eye and a broken rib.

He introduces his girlfriend to crack. She gets pregnant. They become so thoroughly addicted that, just as her water is breaking, he's handing her a crack pipe. Their twin daughters are crack babies.

He splits with his girlfriend, and, because he has a nice job, keeps the girls with him. This does not stop him from locking them in the car while he runs into a dealer's house to score.

The gun: As he recalls it, he was so out of control that his best friend not only has to call the cops but wave a gun at him. His best friend remembers it another way --- as David's gun.

In detox, his arms are so nasty that the staffers have him reach into a tub of detergent so they don't have to touch him. It takes a full month for the drug psychosis to wear off. And he does rehab four times before he finally gets clean.

There are 300+ pages like that in "The Night of the Gun" --- it is a long downward spiral. Reading it, I thought of the Emmylou Harris lines: "One thing they don't tell you about the blues/When you got 'em/You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom/There ain't no end..."

So, you may ask, what kept me reading?

In part, because David Carr emerges from the darkness into a kind of radiance: a new wife, intact family, great job. And because, at the center of his redemption, is a reason a lot of guys can relate to: "Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine."

And, in part, because I know David Carr. Like him a lot. Knew nothing about his past. And so was gobsmacked by every page. For those who do not traffic in New York media circles or read the paper of record, David Carr is the media columnist and sometime culture reporter for The New York Times. He's witty and gutsy and almost always fun to read --- when he's in the Times, I open it with actual enthusiasm.

There's another, better reason I kept reading. I have known a number of people who became addicts. I don't know any now --- some died, some got clean, and those who didn't drifted far from my ambitious, middle-class circle. As a result, I sometimes find my sympathies for addicts to be more abstract than real.

But at least I can still see addicts as victims of a terrible disease. A great many people in our country can't --- which is one reason we spend many times more money on a "war on drugs" and on jails that don't rehabilitate than we do on treatment centers. "The Night of the Gun" is a stark reminder that nice people from good families can sink just as low as the hard case from the projects --- and that drug addiction can, with luck and skill and love and patience, be cured.

David Carr was lucky. His sickness struck him when he lived in Minnesota, an enlightened state with many treatment facilities. He was lucky to have a friend like Dave, who showed up every Sunday to babysit the girls so Carr could go to meetings. (I dare you not to burst into tears when Dave is dying and Carr leans over him to whisper: "I owe you everything in the world.") And he was way lucky that a good woman took him in and made a home for him and his kids.

A few years ago, armed with a tape recorder and a video camera, David Carr went on the road to interview the people who knew him when. The results aren't pretty --- there are videos on his web site that made me wince --- but they certainly leave no doubt about the veracity of the story that he tells. The columnist who wrote about James Frey is not, in any way, like him.

David Carr now finds himself a "genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be a loving and attentive father and husband."

For all that, he says, "I now inhabit a life I don't deserve."

I disagree.

42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A looooonnnnng night, August 21, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own (Hardcover)

The concept behind David Carr's memoir is intriguing. Stoned and drunk for much of his early life, the fact that he couldn't trust his own memories was brought home to him when he was shown that he completely misremembered an incident with a gun (hence the book's title). So, reporter that he is, he set out to interview people who knew him back in the day. He became an investigative reporter tracking down the young David Carr. Along the way, he discovered lots of things he said and did, but of which he has either no or distorted recollections.

So the angle that Night of the Gun takes is attractive. That's the good news. The bad news is that Carr can't quite deliver. For starters, the book is way too long and so the episodes Carr recounts (often with cinematic speed and compactness) tend to become repetitious. So there's a lot of words but not a lot of depth. Moreover, the lack of depth is reflected in the tough guy, Mickey Spillane style Carr chooses to write in, a style that comes across as inauthentic and, within just a few pages, incredibly annoying. Perhaps the point of the style is to create a living-on-the-edge ambience. But it doesn't work very well.

Ultimately, and most seriously, it's difficult to see what the point of Carr's book is. Is it to draw attention to the mysterious ways in which our memories deceive us? But if so, there's precious little real reflection on the issue, and most of it consists of unenlightening one-liners. (What a lost opportunity.) Is it to impress upon us the terrible things that drug and alcohol addictions do? But surely this has been done a bazillion times already in other memoirs as well as in films and novels (read anything by Hubert Selby, Jr., for example). Is the book intended to be a sort of celebrity confessional? But if so, it falls short of the mark because Mr. Carr simply isn't a celebrity.

I'm glad that Carr has straightened out his life. But I'm afraid his book rates no more than two and a half stars. For more authentic and better written recent memoirs of the addicted life, I recommend Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter, David Sheff's Beautiful Boy, or James Salant's Leaving Dirty Jersey.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great story obscured by self-centered detail, October 6, 2008

By 

M. S. Hillis (Lynnwood, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

"The Night of the Gun" has an intriguing premise: unnerved by a loss of confidence in the integrity of his memory, recovering crackhead and crack reporter David Carr decides to turn the tools of his trade on himself and investigate his own past. Unfortunately, this gimmick isn't enough to sustain what is ultimately a pretty typical tale of addiction and recovery.

The book is strongest when Carr is reporting on his harrowing descent into a drug-induced psychosis. Let's face it, this is a side of humanity most of us will never experience for ourselves, and hearing someone tell how he left twin baby girls inside a car on a winter night to go do some coke, or had to soak his arms scabbed from needles in a basin of detergent because the people at the detox center were afraid to touch him, delivers a frisson of horror at the spectacle and relief that we'll never tread down that path.

There are also some brief but intriguing side forays into the ephemeral nature of memory and the implications on the narratives we write about ourselves.

The weakest part of the book comes in its last third, when Carr is well on the path to recovery (a brief detour into alcohol abuse adds a bit of drama later on) and is rebuilding his journalistic career. Carr is obviously a hard-driving reporter and editor, but a long stretch of the book ends up being a self-congratulatory look at his professional credentials. While he acknowledges shortcomings, much of it comes off feeling more like he's answering the job-interview question, "What is your biggest weakness?" with hoary responses like "I push people to excel too much".

Carr's obviously a sharp guy and writes about his past with a pretty dispassionate and critical eye. He doesn't shy away about owning up to mistakes, but also doesn't attempt to take the blame for every bad thing that transpired, if the finger of evidence points elsewhere.

Carr does indicate that he understands the potential pitfalls of his project. One editor tells him before starting that the recovery parts of junkie stories are "soooo boring". He also briefly meditates on his apparently widely-known narcissistic tendencies. It's a shame he didn't take those reflections a little more seriously and chop about 100 pages from the book.

There is a great story in here, and one can only marvel Carr's improbable turnaround and come away wishing him a clean and healthy future. It's just too bad that it is often obscured by Carr's need to air lots of detail that isn't really that compelling to people who are not David Carr.