That’s not to say I didn’t like the second half of the book, where David Carr gets his life back on track and ends up working as a writer for the New York Times. But I’m a sucker for a sad story, the more heartbreak the better. I look for brokenness in all the books I read. I was a huge fan of James Frey‘s A Million Little Pieces (which Carr takes a few potshots at). Even now, after the drama, I’d recommend A Million Little Pieces to anyone looking for a solid story about addiction. It rings true despite not being “100% true.” But that wasn’t the last book I loved. The first half of The Night of the Gun was. The first half. The part where his life is on the rocks, not where he’s salvaging it.
Reading the first half of The Night of the Gun I was pulled in by Carr’s unique memoir. Carr’s a journalist, so instead of locking himself in a room to write down his memories he decided to interview everyone he knew from his sordid past first. A recorded interview with every drunk friend. Every drug dealer. Every woman. Every boss. Everyone that he had fucked over … including his daughters. Carr seems almost as surprised as the reader by what he finds while investigating his history. Watching himself slide from experimentation, to addiction, to going over the edge. Towards the end of the first half Carr describes deciding to leave his newly born twins, two crack babies (both he and his then wife had not stopped using even after she was pregnant), in the back seat of his shitbox Nova on a Minneapolis winter’s night while he goes to cop drugs. After all, he thinks, it’ll only be ten minutes … tops. “Naw. Nothing to it, really. In that pool of darkness, I decided that my teeny twin girls would be safe. It was cold, but not really cold.” After he finally gets out of the flophouse? “How long had it been, really? It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a cold dread in all corners of my being.” In the first half of The Night of the Gun, Carr investigates his past and finds that there is no one to blame but himself.
Which is the lesson of the book. We all look back on the scenes of our lives and our brains trick our memories into making us the heroes. The underdog. The person who struggled against all odds to become who and what we are today. But in the end we are the odds … always have been (some more than others of course, not all of us leave twins in an unheated car while scoring crack). That’s what makes Carr’s book different (especially the first half). Despite the lack of redemption, this realization that he isn’t the hero, the happy-go-lucky longshot that he thought he was, that he was really just an asshole … he accepts it. And accepts that, despite the shitbaggery of his mess of a past, that there were good times too.
