(#11 of 2010) David Carr is a media critic for The New York Times. The Night of the Gun is his memoir. Graphed against such variables as fame and annual income, Carr's life went up and down into his early 30s, when the coke addict and his coke-dealer girlfriend had twins. Carr cleaned up, raised his kids and set off on a career trajectory that eventually would land him at the old Gray Lady. Carr is a good storyteller with some dark material (drugs, domestic assault) to spin such memoir propellers as tension and conflict. So what's the problem? Two things. Carr doesn't remember a lot of the details. And then there's the fact that his research was happening just as public faith in the memoir shattered into a million little pieces. To solve both problems, Carr set off to research and report his own story like he's doing a profile on some other subject. Ex-wives, relatives, former bosses—Carr talks to them all. My problem is what he does with the material he gathers.
Rather than constructing a really rip-roaring addiction memoir, Carr's book chronicles the story of a reporter going back and researching his memoir. It sets the story and the reader at a remove. It's less a memoir than a meta-memoir. The thing is, interviews of the type Carr recounts in this book aren't unusual in memoir research. Plenty of truth-seeking writers go back and interview the people who were around during the events described in their memoirs. I did it, plenty of people do it. It's just, most of us don't place those interviews within the text of the resultant books. Because: Those interviews are boring.
Three tangentially related points:1. Carr's propensity to refer to people only by their first names is a little irritating by the end. Around p. 119 he talks about "Tom" — Tom Arnold. Random, that. Then toward the end of the book there's the stuff about "Jayson" and "Howell." It's a little too cute. Why not just say it's Jayson Blair and Howell Raines?
2. The difference between memoir and autobiography. I picked this book up thinking it was a memoir -- which I take to mean, a recounting and analysis of an abbreviated section of a life. And yet, it turns out to be more of an autobiography—an account of the whole of a life. The book could have benefited from some sharpening. I didn't care what Carr learned about managing journalists at the Washington City Paper.
3. Carr's sobriety checklist on p. 189 includes the advice, "Avoid writing or reading junkie memoirs." This is interesting — really? Couldn't addiction memoirs function as inspiration? Hey, this dude quit drinking, so why can't I? That said, few people can glamourize drugs and alcohol better than those whose affection for the substances got them into trouble. Carr fell off the wagon after more than a decade of total sobriety, risking his job and his relationship with his daughters. Is there a cumulative effect to all that glamour? I should still read the Bill Clegg memoir. After that, I'll be done for awhile.