The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own.

by David Carr

Paperback, 2009

Status

Available

Publication

Simon & Schuster (2009), 400 pages

Description

"New York Times" reporter and columnist Carr crafts a groundbreaking memoir on his years as an addict. Built on more than 50 videotaped interviews with people from his past, Carr's investigation of his own history reveals a past far more harrowing than he allowed himself to remember.

User reviews

LibraryThing member damfino83
An almost painfully honest memoir- taking a serious journalistic approach to ones memoir is a great idea. From a serious drug addiction (having your young children waiting in the car in a bad neighborhood while you go inside to buy and use crack) to tracking down stories while high, reading about
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Carr's attempts to juggle his addiction with family and work before he becomes clean is akin to watching a beautiful, rare train get into a wreck.

Very interesting, fast-paced, heart-wrenching at times and hilarious and sweet at others. Carr balances journalistic writing with prose very well, which is a relief when reading about someone on a path of self-destruction being painfully honest about their mistakes. On top of that, I think journalism students would find this book particularly interesting, and his website has further info and recordings of the work he did to put the book together.
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LibraryThing member Neftzger
This was one of those books that I didn't want to put down. David Carr has lived a very colorful life, but what intrigued me about this book was that he was a journalist who came to acknowledge his own lack of objectivity. In fact, he discovers that none of us are objective and that our memories
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aren't simple video cameras recording our lives. Our memories are true to our emotions rather than the facts, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It does mean that we're all imperfect and that it takes a lot of work to piece together a scene based on witness testimony.

As a recovering drug addict and alcoholic David was thrown into single parenthood and openly admits that he wasn't a martyr in any sense. He openly admits to his own fallibility and failures, but at one point while his children were still young he chose to recover his life. This book is his investigation into who he was and the impact of his mistakes on the lives of those around him. His writing style is journalistic with use of strong metaphors and it works well for this book.
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LibraryThing member LancasterWays
Based on the stats to the side of this page, I’d guess that those readers, including myself, who took a dim view of this book are far outnumbered by a generally receptive audience. One could conclude that, on the whole, only those readers who enjoyed the book are likely to take the time to record
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it in their LibraryThing account and write a review of it. I am anomalous then: not only did I dislike David Carr’s memoir, The Night of the Gun, but here I am, dutifully warning my fellow readers to shy away from it.

Carr is himself something of an anomaly (in reality, if not in “type”): the addict who made good. After spending his twenties and thirties as a coke addict, crackhead and raving psychotic, Carr managed to pull himself together, maintain (for the most part, with recent slip-ups) nearly twenty years clean, raise two daughters and succeed professionally, landing a job at The New York Times. It’s a story you’ve seen in a dozen movies, but seems impossible in real life.

Musing on his past, Carr decided to investigate it as he would any other story, as a reporter, to learn if it all happened as he remembered it (specifically the eponymous “Night of the Gun”). Carr’s approach was novel and promising—by employing journalistic techniques, he quickly learned some disturbing things about his past and who he had once been, and the story becomes, to a degree, the study of the mutability (and transmutability) of memory. Interviews and court documents reveal a narrative that Carr himself had once lived but of which he was now only dimly aware.

Sadly, Carr’s method promises more excitement than it can deliver, and it becomes a gimmick. Yes, he interviews old friends and associates, but the revelations gleaned from those conversations are not as surprising or significant to the readers as they must have been to Carr. Carr’s discussion of memory is shallow and, given the potential of the topic, ultimately detracts from the book.

Carr’s narrative is at its strongest and most focused as he documents his addiction. When he begins discussing his discovery, the narrative unspools and the story loses its power as Carr waxes treacly, invoking wonder at his daughters, the value of hard work, and the redemptive power of love. It’s all fine, but it’s dull, poorly done and self-indulgent. One gets the impression that this began as a story for the Times—it would have been better had it stayed that way.

The Night of the Gun is not all bad. Carr is a talented writer and rarely fails to paint a scene vividly or sketch someone’s character quickly, and he often employs a good turn of phrase (all skills of the journalist). Carr’s portrayal of his addiction and descent into (near) madness is incredibly well done. Carr was on the right track with his story—this is something of interest here for readers—and his methodology and concerns are intriguing, if underdeveloped. Carr argues that everyone’s story deserves to be told. I can’t argue with that, but I think he and I might quibble over the length alloted each narrative.
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LibraryThing member reverends
Autobiographical tales featuring survivors of drug addiction and substance abuse have always been popular. There is something intriguing about listening as someone describes hitting rock bottom, and then somehow managing to miraculously turn themselves around.

Of course, such books are so popular
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that one must sometimes wonder whether the facts have been embellished for the sole purpose of entertainment. The debacle surrounding A Million Little Pieces alerted the literary community to the dangers behind that. While biographies involve investigations on behalf of the author, autobiographies become suspect, as the possible motivations of the self-diarists make them unreliable witnesses at best.

This is where David Carr's book steps away from the rest of the pack. The Night of the Gun almost doesn't qualify as an autobiography. He remembers very little of what actually occurred during his days of drug abuse, and what he does remember is almost wholly unreliable. So, be an investigative reporter, he uses the skills on hand to delve into the mystery that is his own life.

This is where Carr's book leaves the others behind. He wanders through the down and out periods of his life with a grim curiosity that never lapses into self-pity or melodrama. He could be writing about somebody else entirely, and in some ways, he is. His style isn't emotionless; one would have to be truly cold and indifferent not to feel something while looking back on some of the things Carr did had had done to him. But there is a slight detachment from the source material that keeps his observations from becoming self-serving or, even worse, self-pitying. He not only makes no excuses for his own actions, he doesn't even understand some of them himself.

Carr's book will appeal to fans of similar books, such as Permanent Midnight, but don't expect a carbon copy of the format. If Carr's story doesn't appear to have the obviously uplifting ending or tone that you were expecting, that's because it wasn't meant to be that kind of book. Carr isn't telling us his story so we can learn from his mistakes. He exploring his own painful past, like probing the raw nerve beneath a sore tooth, because he just can't bring himself to leave it behind, at last not without knowing what it all must have appeared from the outside looking in.
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LibraryThing member maryslinde
David Carr works for the New York Times. He is from Minnesota and I worked with his mother. My bookclub thought it would be a good choice. Although I have a deep understanding of chemical dependency, I was disappointed in this book. I felt as if the author wandered and expressed his thoughts in
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such a random way.
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LibraryThing member tuke
Incredibly depressing book about addiction . . . Last 75 pages are emotionally harrowing.
LibraryThing member satyridae
Fascinating on many levels, this memoir was written by a reporter who fact-checked himself rigorously. In so doing, he discovered that many of his memories were false or significantly altered from the reality experienced by the other participants. The layer added by his exploration of the nature of
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memory is perhaps more interesting that the somewhat banal "crackhead wises up" story it's wrapped around.
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LibraryThing member Sullywriter
Carr uses a unique approach that I found engrossing to tell the harrowing stories of his alcoholism, drug addition, and battle with cancer. Candid, raw, and often quite funny.
LibraryThing member scarequotes
At first it seems like a gimmick: Investigating your own life to write a journalistic memoir. But Carr puts the device to work, producing a book that on one level is a junkie-makes-good story, on another level is a story about how we tell our own stories, on another level a rumination on the gifts
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and limitations of memory, and on another level is just a guy trying to make sense of stuff the best way he knows how.

I've known a few addicts, I've known a few journalists, I'm fascinated by memory, I'm a relatively new dad who frequently feels like I'm pretending at being normal (even if I wouldn't describe myself as a maniac, as Carr does). This book hits a lot of sweet spots and knocks 'em out of the park.
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LibraryThing member gkleinman
Written in reaction to the backlash over "the more fiction than truth" memoirs like A Million Little Pieces, David Carr's Night of The Gun takes a nearly scientific approach to the reporting of a life of addiction and recovery.

At the start the book is a fascinating musing on the difference between
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what actually happened and how we remember it. But the novelty of this device ultimately tires and we are left with a brutal account of an ultimately unsympathetic character who makes it nearly impossible to root for him.

Night of The Gun does have it's high points, but most of them come in the first half of the book. The backside of the book is an exercise in endurance with Carr turning his focus to the tragedies of the people around him and an account of him watching his carefully constructed world fall a part.

At the end of this little experiment of a book I came away feeling exhausted and unfulfilled. The conclusion I reached was that I'd rather read the mostly true recollections of someone going through he'll than the blow by blow reporting based on the mostly true recollections of others.

A Million Little Pieces may be filled with a million little white lies, but I enjoyed that book a million times more than this one. Memoir isn't really pure nonfiction and that's a good thing as a storyteller will always triumph a reporter when it comes to creating a compelling personal stories.
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LibraryThing member gbasscpa
Interesting
LibraryThing member rivkat
Carr’s autobiography telling the story of his long history of addiction and shorter history of recovery, done as what he remembers plus investigation that he did as if he were reporting a story—which reveals a lot of things that he didn’t remember correctly, such as who exactly was holding a
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gun on one important night. He eventually took custody of his twins, born prematurely when both parents were addicted to crack and nearly incapable of taking care of themselves, much less babies. It’s beautifully written, and it has the messiness of life—his redemption story is about getting himself together to take care of his kids, and that is powerful, and yet when he relapses he drives drunk while they’re in the car. He achieves what seems like objectivity about his own history, including the parts he can’t remember, though I wish he’d talked a bit more about how he felt about all this, including about baring his lowest points for inspection.
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LibraryThing member CatieN
This is a brutally honest memoir by an amazing writer. Carr's life story will stay with me for a long time.
LibraryThing member msf59
“Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old
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memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.”

“I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon”

I was not aware of David Carr as an award-winning journalist, but I remember being intrigued by this memoir, when it came out about a decade ago. As many books do, it got lost in the shuffle, but I was able to finally track the audiobook down and boy, I am glad I did. This may be the best addiction story I have ever read and possibly the best written.
Due to his chronic drug and alcohol abuse, (and this is some harrowing stuff) he thought the best approach was to rely on others to help fill in the gaps of his careening life, so he began to interview family, friends and associates and unearth police and medical reports. Carr compiled all this research and used it to tell his story. Sadly, Carr died in 2015, still in his late 50s and sober for many years, but what a print legacy to leave behind. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member dele2451
Carr really lays it all out there about the vicious circle of addiction--the good, the bad, the ugly, and the really ugly. A frank and important story about addiction, detox, recovery, relapse, redemption, and lasting rehabilitation.
LibraryThing member pivic
Kenny actually has a lot of fondness—in clinical terms, it would be called “euphoric recall”—for those days.


One of the best things about this book, David Carr's autobiography, is his no crying-over-spilled-milk, simple and non-alacrious style. It's not noir, it's just a very good author's
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voice, elegantly translated from his journalistic self.

The book is mostly about his addiction, the long years of addiction, where he had two children, went from school to real jobs, trying to sober up, trying to remember, trying to remember, trying to build himself up, etc.

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. —LEONARD, A MAN WHO CANNOT MAKE NEW MEMORIES AND IS SEARCHING FOR HIS WIFE’S KILLER, MEMENTO.


One of the most interesting parts about this book is that Carr has interviewed people from his past: exes, former friends, bosses, drug dealers, people he went into sobriety with. He compares his memory of events with theirs. No surprise: when he was a full-blown addict, he didn't exactly remember a lot. Mind shot, blood shot, Allshot.

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.


The eyes that saw too much because they did not close often enough.


He relives his life through this book, his memoir, where he at the best of times seems very introspect and at the worst of times seems bloated and boasting. Thankfully, there's very little of the latter and a lot of critical moments, mostly turned on his self:

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.


There's some great insight collected in this book. There's also repetition, but where repetition is due; I don't think one can really expect a person to go through rehab or trying to quit a sickness without being fully aware of it, every day of one's life, when it's come as far as in Carr's case (not that he's unique in the junkie's aspect, more like a copy); for conscience to be there, conscious repetition has to be in-place, otherwise things will fall apart.

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 the 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. It is that ecosystem, all there for the inventorying within twenty 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. Nothing like the beer goggles and a nice bracing whiff of something to help you reframe your little disaster area. Hmmm, just a second here. A little of the hair of the dog. Yep. Now, that’s better. Everything is new again.


In a broader sense, addiction can be enormously simplifying. While other people worry about their 401(k)’s, getting their kids into the right nursery school and/or college, and keeping their plot to take over the world in good effect, a junkie or a drunk just has to worry about his next dose. It leads to a life that is, in a way, remarkably organized. What are we doing today? Exactly what we did yesterday, give or take.


His writing on his abusive self is precious (and naturally horrendous):

I found out that as a birthday gift, her friends had surprised her with a naked young man hanging from the ceiling of her cabin. I was livid. “I can remember being at my cabin, and you giving me a black eye and breaking my rib and throwing me off the dock,” she said. I had not remembered that last part, but as soon as she said it, I knew it had to be true. I did not so much move in with Anna as suddenly become someone who did not leave. Regardless of who is doing the remembering, some nasty, ineluctable truths lie between us. She was in the habit of slamming doors in my face—I called her “Bam Bam” in part because of that—and I was in the habit of coming right through those doors and choking her. She was using crack when her water broke, signaling that the twins had arrived two and a half months early. I was the one who had brought her those drugs. I treated her as an ATM, using her drugs and money almost at will, while she seemed more than willing to make the trade. In spite of the fact that I was the one who stepped up and raised our children, who shook off the Life, there are times when the moral high ground rests with her. I hit her, for one thing. For another, whatever she did, she did out of a kind of love. My presence in her life was far more mercenary.


All in all, very well written. Carr's style is so honed and he is so talented, that this reads like very few autobiographies that I have ever read, none of which are stylistically like this one, really. True, one could not towards Hunter S. Thompson, but all in all, this is very special and one to recommend for all, on the life of a man who - for a very long, cut-up time - did not care for responsibility at all, and now shows that he does.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks. —HUNTER S. THOMPSON
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LibraryThing member tmph
More stars than I personally think it deserves, partly because of what the author himself refers to as "junkie memoirs." But many good things about the book; one way of learning something about the workings of the junkie/alcoholic mind.

The conceit itself of the book is the most interesting for me.
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He decides to use his investigative skills on his own life and memories. This, I think, is important for all of us, especially those with fuzzy memories, to consider.
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LibraryThing member Andy_DiMartino
Had to post this read. Wonderful!!!
LibraryThing member mixco13
One of the most honest books I've read... One of the best written books I've read.
LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
This one's another midlife memoir. There's no shortage of these out there and the author, to his credit, knows it. A few things set this one apart from the others, though. For one thing, it's got professional-level reporting on incidents that the author freely admits he can't remember all that
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well. Carr has obviously done his reading on how unreliable memory can be, but he doesn't hide the fact that he finds out some genuinely unpleasant things about his former self and has had work hard to integrate the self that's writing "The Night of the Gun" with the often unpleasant protagonist who's as the center of most of the book's action. While every memoir might be described as an exercise in self-discovery, Carr seems to be especially committed to finding out -- and telling the reader -- who he is and was. He details the evasions that addicts use to get around their own moral beliefs, the languages and habits they share, and all of the things that doing a whole lot of coke -- and then crack -- in the eighties cost him. It mustn't have been pleasant for the author to go over this material -- some of which involves domestic violence and child endangerment -- but he doesn't spare his ego and provides a remarkably clear-eyed of who he was and who he might be now. "The Night of the Gun" suggests that he's a far braver author than others.

Something else that sets this one apart from the pack is the sheer quality of its prose. Carr was a good journalist and knew it: his writing has a verve and spark that suggests that he's no rookie. It takes years of practice and considerable talent to sound this fresh on the page. Lastly, Carr emphasizes throughout "The Night of the Gun" that recovery is an active process, and not just a matter of not drinking, smoking, or sniffing. He should know: fifteen years after he quit coke, he somehow slid a comfortable, suburban kind of alcoholism, something he finds not just painful but also painfully unhip. The way he tells it, it takes work to keep your demons at bay, to maintain connections with others, to find a reason not to get high or drunk. Considering how far Carr was at various points throughout this story, it's incredible that he got as far as he did. The author's death at a relatively young age -- from medical issues not directly connected to his substance abuse -- gives the book an added sense of poignancy, but also seems, in its way, like a genuine victory. Carr seems to worry at various times if the world really needed another recovery memoir, but I'd say that it's better for having this one in it, even if it now serves as its author's own valediction. Fare thee well, Mr. Carr.
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Language

Original language

English

Barcode

9053
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