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New
York Times
reporter David Carr is currently a happily married father
with a good job and a nice life. However, he spent years as
a heavy cocaine user. He snorted, smoked, shot up, and sold.
He was fired from jobs, went in and out of jail, beat up girlfriends,
and smoked crack with his pregnant girlfriend when she went
into labor with their twins. Like many recovering addicts
in America, he decided to write a memoir about his experiences,
resulting in the book Night of the Gun. Unlike most
of them, he went back to interview the other players in his
story—girlfriends, dealers and employees—to find
out how much he forgot.
Since
Carr is a reporter, it makes sense that he would take this
approach. The book is well-written, but only newbies to the
addiction memoir will find anything worthwhile in it. Over
and over again, Carr asks himself why he's writing a memoir,
and over and over again his answer is essentially, "Why the
hell not?" More disturbing, however, is the incredible lack
of insight that the process of writing this memoir provides
the author, which will leave readers wondering if Carr is
dense, crazy, or in denial.
The title
refers to a particularly bad night where Carr's drunken aggression
resulted in his best friend pointing a gun at him and asking
him to please leave his house. Twenty years later, Carr contacts
his friend who gently reminds him that Carr actually had the
gun—a story that is corroborated by other witnesses.
Carr insists he was not, even then, a gun-owning sort of guy.
But he was wrong. Oddly, when he discovers that his memory
of the titular incident is completely twisted around, he doesn't
appear to register any emotion at all. It's as if it's simply
enough for him to have the words on the cover the book to
express that this is "the darkest story of his life." Carr
expresses no horror at the beast he was and the terror and
anxiety he put so many others through.
In interview
after interview, Carr talks to his friends, lovers, former
co-workers, and drug buddies and discovers that he wasn't
the casual user who was mostly holding it together that he
thought he was, but a scumbag who abused women and got other
people involved in "the life." But Carr seems completely emotionally
detached from his addict self. He makes no judgments, which,
granted, is a sign of a good reporter, but in a memoir of
recovery seems like a sign of derangement of some sort. Carr
spends quite a bit of time convincing the reader that he was
the best parent for his twin girls, but it's not clear how
readers can take his word on this when he admits he was wrong
on so many other things. Carr discovers that he left his twin
babies in a car on a winter night to get drugs, brought them
around to drug deals, and left them in his house with his
drug buddies, but he still seems to believe that he was a
better parent than the girls' mother.
Carr's
strange detachment extends to others. He seems to have no
problem painting certain people, noticeably his ex-wife, as
crazed addicts, but when it comes to tender emotions, Carr
flounders. He has a few paragraphs about his friend who often
watches the twins while Carr tries to recover, but he paints
such a vague two-dimensional portrait of this man that when
he dies, the reader feels no emotion. The same goes for some
family members. He barely mentions them until they die and
then suddenly readers are treated to several paragraphs on
how great and important this person was to Carr.
Night
of the Gun has provocative chapter titles like "Diagnosis:
Narcissistic Asshole," but they never live up to their promise.
Carr admits that he was never good at "the nomenclature" of
editing, but readers may wish he'd told his editor about that
before the book was published and perhaps they could have
worked on this together. It's obvious from all the research
that Carr is a good reporter, but that doesn't necessarily
make someone a good memoirist. The novelty of reporting on
one's own past will not satisfy readers looking for insight
and resolution. Ultimately, Night of the Gun is only
for diehard fans of the addiction memoir.
(November,
2008)
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