THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life. His own.
BY DAVID CARR
SIMON & SCHUSTER, 400pp, £14.99 A LOT OF ADDICTION AND MISERY memoirs have now been exposed as outright fakes. Love and Consequences by Margaret B Jones, for example, purported to tell the first-hand story of
a mixed-race girl growing up among drug dealers and gang members in Los Angeles. It was a complete fabrication. James Frey won fame with a ridiculously overwritten memoir of addiction and gruelling recovery, A Million Little Pieces. After Oprah Winfrey challenged him on her show, he had to admit that much of it was untrue.
These are drastic cases of deliberate deception, incontrovertibly exposed. The entire genre of the misery memoir, and its sub-group, the addiction confession, remains pervasively suspect, though. They profess to recollect details of childhood, even infancy, or of the years when the subject was off his head, and then weave them into a satisfying story. What are the chances of factual accuracy?
Because we all know that not only do we forget most of the details of our own pasts, we fabulise. Knowingly or not, we construct stories that suit us now, improving on the shapeless or unwelcome facts. Tony Blair told Des O'Connor that he tried to stow away on a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas when he was a boy. He had been to the airport but there were no such flights.
David Carr is a New York Times reporter with a great reputation for tenacious investigation of the stories he covers. "When I got on a story, I was a dog on a meat bone," he says. Here that bone is his own past life as a crack addict, drug dealer, drunk, philanderer and beater of women. "Let's stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices," Carr states.
Rather than produce an unreliable misery memoir, David Carr has carefully documented his own life to uncover all the worst details. One night he got drunk with a friend and assaulted him. When he next turned up at the friend's house, the friend pulled a gun on him to make him go away. You'd remember that, right?
Wrong. Twenty years later, the friend maintained that Carr had been the one with the gun. Carr didn't believe it, he's never been a gun guy. Then another friend from the time corroborated the information. He'd certainly had a gun that day, a .38 special.
So Carr decided to fact-check his own life, "using the prosaic tools of journalism". He bought a video camera, a digital tape recorder and an external hard drive for all the data. He conducted 60 interviews over three years, transcribed by a third party. He went through hundreds of medical files, legal documents and published sources, many of them reproduced here, including psychiatric assessments and police reports of his arrests.
What he found is ugly as sin. "I was wrong about a lot of things. In the novelised version of my life, I was basically a good guy who took a couple of wrong turns and ended up in the ditch. In the reported version, I was a person who saw the sign that said dangerous curves ahead and floored it, heedlessly mowing down all sorts of people at every turn."
The people he interviewed all have hard things to tell him. "You were full of shit, like any junkie," observes a lawyer. "You smelled bad, you looked bad, you were sweating like a pig," recalls an old friend. "You were psychotic at the end, and you scared me," says another doper pal. "You were drunk every day," reports the former husband of the fellow addict with whom Carr had twins (they were smoking crack the day her waters broke).
Carr, a master of the pungent phrase, is no less severe on himself in his own connecting narrative. At one point, he describes himself as having become "just one more part of the human chum that courses through the creaky apparatus of the criminal justice system". At another, he says: "I did not date women, I took hostages."
Yet The Night of the Gun is a redemption story, too. Carr, who has evidently always been extraordinarily tough both mentally and physically, finally got off the crack and stopped drinking, at least for a time.
He successfully raised his twin daughters as a single parent, while their mother sank ever further ("she once called me and said that she had missed a court date because her front tooth had fallen out and the dog had eaten it").
"Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine," he says, simply. He ferociously remade his career as a journalist. He married again. "I still stare at the girl, still wonder why she is with me."
Although he has since had serious health problems and sometimes hit the bottle again (and been re-arrested for drink-driving), he has survived. "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."
The Night of the Gun is both an outstanding and original piece of journalism and a stunning retort to the normal procedures of misery and addiction memoirs. More than that, it's a caution to us all, even those of us who can usually remember what we did last night. For we all have our own creation myths, Carr warns.
"Whether it is in book form or something told across the intimacy of first-date candlelight, the this-is-me, this-is-who-I-am story is a myth in the classic sense, a tale told with personal gods and touchstones. It becomes more and more sacred as it is told. And perhaps less and less truthful."
The full article contains 1003 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
