It is a piece of investigative journalism that has set the New York literary world alight. It is a story of exhaustive research, scores of interviews and poring over detailed documents dragged out of dusty archives.
But the subject of New York Times reporter David Carr’s forthcoming book is not a national security secret or revelations about a big business scam. It is an exposé of his own life as a terribly addicted crack fiend.
Carr’s book, The Night of the Gun, is a searing study of his struggles with drug addiction and the impact it had on himself, his girlfriends, his children and the rest of his family and friends. But, in a publishing genre rocked by recent scandals over faked ”misery memoirs”, Carr took the unusual step of writing his book as a documented investigation, not simply a memoir.
As a result, Carr turned his reporting techniques on his own history. He interviewed more than 60 members of his family, old friends, doctors and police, thus piecing together his own life. He also tracked down and read hundreds of medical, police and personal documents and letters. Just to hammer the point home, he set up a website in which many of the documents can be viewed. They include arrest reports for drunk-driving and details of his stays in rehab.
The result has been a critical triumph and early reviews of the book have hailed it as a masterpiece of both journalism and memoir. The book is published next month and has rapidly become one of the most eagerly awaited books of the summer. That will come as a huge relief to the publishing industry. So-called misery memoirs had been a lucrative money-spinner for publishing houses, but successive scandals had tarnished the genre and left sales lagging. Books by former alcoholic James Frey, former gangster Margaret B Jones and former prostitute JT LeRoy had all been revealed as partly or wholly fakes.
Carr has reversed that trend with a memoir that is almost over-documented as fact. ”Night of the Gun pulls a besmirched genre out of the gutter, drags it through rehab, and returns it to a respectable place in society,” said well-known journalist and commentator Arianna Huffington. Reviews have praised the work, both as a piece of ”junkie lit” memoir and as a piece of thorough and honest journalistic research, albeit one with an unusual subject.
”Carr gets the unalterable fact that he himself is not a reliable source in his own memoir,” wrote the New Republic‘s Sacha Zimmerman. ”Too many addicts will never fully appreciate the toll their disease has taken on others, simply by not remembering.”
There is little doubt that Carr has done a thorough, if grim, job of discovering his own life as an addict. The book pulls no punches in its description of the horrors of his life addicted to powerful drugs. He describes smoking crack while looking after his children at home, holing up in the same flat for days on end and developing a severe paranoia that the police were after him. He ruthlessly details the arrests, the fights and the medical problems associated with the lifestyle of a hardcore junkie and dealer who beats up the mother of his children. At one stage he describes leaving his two infant children outside in a freezing car while he goes into a crack den to shoot up.
He is also brutally honest about the surreal experience of investigating his own addicted life before he cleaned up and became a successful journalist. ”It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening experience, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement,” Carr wrote. ”I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.” – guardian.co.uk