In 1986, more than a
hundred people crammed into a Minneapolis bar for a surprise 30th-birthday
party for journalist David Carr. When the guest of honor opened the door, they
were all wearing T-shirts that read "I Am A Close Personal Friend Of David Carr."
When Carr later began researching his more than two decades in the grip of
alcoholism and cocaine addiction for The Night Of The Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story Of His
Life—His Own, he revisited many of those people—at least
one of whom still had the T-shirt. He had partied with them, screwed them over,
beaten them up, suffered through detox with them, wrested away custody of their
children, and called them in the middle of the night for bail money or a hit.
Few of them remained his close personal friends, but it's because so many of
them still answer his calls that Carr was able to write this gripping, fearless
memoir.
The conceit is appealingly
meta: Carr realizes that his memory of events while high, crashing, jonesing, and
in recovery has been reconstructed to fit the narrative he'd like to make of
his life now. So he approaches his own story as if he were reporting someone
else's, interviewing the sources and putting the pieces back together. Fed up
with junkie-memoir clichés, he does his best to scribble over the neat
Protestant arc of sin, forgiveness, and redemption, even though the life
history he's rewritten in his mind to conform with his present circumstances
contains an abundance of that material. The central question is whether all
along there was some spark of the David Carr he is now—father, New York Times reporter, recovering addict complete with all the
meetings and slogans—or whether he had sunk so low that he wouldn't
recognize himself.
The title of his book
refers to an incident when he went to a friend's house to confront him about
abandoning Carr during a night of excess. As Carr remembered it, the friend
pulled a gun on him, but according to the friend, it was Carr who had the gun.
Sometimes the truths he uncovers are degrading, like the beatings he gave one
girlfriend. Sometimes they're vindicating, like the twins he refused to give
back to their mother because she couldn't stay sober. But no matter which
direction the signs point, Carr follows them with a distinctive voice and his
best shot at complete honesty.