Rarely does an opportunity for payback come with such delicious
irony.
But the truth is, the fact that The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates
the Darkest Story of His Life—His Own, the new book by David
Carr, is repetitive, self-serving and dull, brings me no joy. This
despite the fact that almost exactly ten years ago, when Carr was
the editor of the Washington City Paper, he ran a hit
piece on me and a book I had just published. The book,
Wasted, is a terrible and embarrassing recovery memoir.
It’s about how I quit drinking. The City Paper reporter,
Courtney Rubin, wrote that the market for recovery memoirs was
saturated, that there was no point to my book, and that basically I
was a fool. She also managed to make several mistakes in the short
piece, not the least of which was writing that my high school,
Georgetown Prep, was run by “super strict nuns.” Of course,
Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school.
So here we are ten years later and David Carr, who is now a
columnist for the New York Times, has produced…a recovery memoir. If the market for
these things was saturated ten years ago, by now most of them are
so full of cliches that they are all but unreadable. Carr’s is no
exception. He was a drunk and crack addict and did a lot of dumb
things growing up in Minneapolis. He also beat women, including two
girlfriends in one day, one of whom — the future mother of his
child — suffered a broken rib. Despite this, Carr managed to land
a job as the editor of a Minneapolis weekly, the Twin Cities
Reader. It was there he told a female staffer she has a “nice
rack.” From there he went, after a stop or two, to the New York
Times. Something tells me that if Carr were a Republican the
Times would not find his Maileresque romps so
forgivable.
Carr admits that after fourteen years of sobriety he drank and
did drugs again in 2002, and drank his way through his coverage of
Hurricane Katrina. The Night of the Gun recounts all of
this with the banality typical of the one-downsmanship drunkie
genre. Think of a well-used trope from the recovery genre, open
Carr’s book, and presto. Sassy, pseudo-self-deprecating language?
Check. “Where does a junkie’s time go? I know how it goes: in
fifteen-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from
hit to hit.” Self-aggrandizement disguised as humility? Check.
“Erin and Megan [Carr’s kids] grew up with a broad understanding of
what ‘normal’ was supposed to be.” Redemption without the guilt or
shame? Did I mention where he works now?
This is all unfortunate, because Carr is one of the most
enjoyable journalists working today. His column is one of the few
reasons I have left for picking up the New York Times. He
writes with punch and color, and is very funny. It is truly
baffling that this gifted writer, who has covered everything from
the Oscars to Rupert Murdoch, didn’t go with his strength and write
a book about the modern media. Particularly sharp is Carr’s
coverage of the collapsing newspaper industry. In one column he sat
down with an old colleague from the City Paper and asked
him, “So you think we’re going to outrun this rock?” The answer, we
now know, is no. Even a compilation of Carr’s Times pieces
would be fresher than The Night of the Gun.
Yet Carr has added a twist to The Night of the Gun that
supposedly gives it more ballast as a candid work of true
journalism: he interviews people who were present for his arrests,
hospital stays, job interviews, etc. This is supposed to keep Carr
on the up and up, but has the unfortunate effect of compounding the
narcissism inherent in the recovery memoir. So why did you give me,
a crack head, a job? Carr asks. Why, because you had such amazing
guts and charisma, the editor answers. It’s navel-gazing with
mirrors.
Carr also avoids the monster bong on the coffee table: media
bias and lies. His self-scrutiny and rigorous 12-step honesty
doesn’t including asking if he has worked with or enabled
journalists who are liars — although Jayson Blair gets a brief and
innocuous mention. This would certainly have given The Night of
the Gun real weight and showed an impressive level of
integrity and nerve.
THIS BRINGS ME to the reason I haven’t talked to David Carr in over
ten years. Even before the City Paper piece on me ran, I
knew that the paper had a habit of rewriting copy to the point of
falsifying the reporter’s original story. It had happened to me
personally. Then a friend of mine, a woman who is now a successful
journalist and book author, told me that a piece of hers was
changed so dramatically that the meaning was the opposite of her
original copy. As a result, a woman she profiled went from being a
sympathetic character to what one City Paper editor, while
chuckling, called “the freak of the week.” That editor, while not
David Carr, worked under Carr and is still at the paper. Indeed, he
is interviewed in Carr’s self-hagiography.
At the time I was naive about just how dishonest most
journalists are, and was truly shocked that a newspaper would
simply make stuff up; up until then I thought the letters the paper
always got from people claiming they had been slandered was just
the usual whining from the overly sensitive. But my friend’s
account of how her copy had been changed disturbed me. I kept
thinking of the woman who had been the victim of the slander, how
tens of thousands of people would read the story and get an
impression of her that was false. My father had been a journalist.
Like Carr, I had been influenced by Woodward and Bernstein. But
beyond personal ties and the history of journalism, it was a moral
crime, an assault on truth and deeply hurtful maligning of another
human being.
Eventually I wrote an account of what happened for the New
York Press. The last I heard from David Carr was ten years
ago, a terse email expressing sadness and anger that I had gone
public.
He never got around to interviewing me for The Night of the
Gun.
