In 2006, James Frey decided to blow up the teetering genre of addict lit. It was a steady-selling field, but it had the unfortunate snag of a built-in shelf life. With each new confessional tale, memoirists had to amp up the vomit, the violence, the moments of precedent-setting depravity, lest readers tune out.
Frey tried to one-up them all. A Million Little Pieces depicts him as the baddest addict to walk the bookshelves, a hard-living, hard-loving super doper with a tragic past. He wore his credo—"FTBSITTTD"—etched on his arm. It stood for "Fuck the bullshit, it's time to throw down." Frey was able to pocket a sales pitch from Oprah and a few million dollars before thesmokinggun.com nailed him for making it all up. It shouldn't have been a surprise. A man with a let's-throw-down tattoo would have been speared by mockery before any self-respecting group of recovering addicts.
Within these colors of fraud David Carr, a columnist for The New York Times, began to research his own doper memoir, The Night of the Gun (Simon & Schuster, 385 pp., $26). Now clean for 20 years—with a few select engagements with relapse—Carr never considered writing an autobiography. What respectable journalist wishes to pen his own 385-page abasement for a national audience? But by then he had more compelling interests at hand—namely paying for his twin daughters' college tuition. And as anyone in recovery knows, humbling oneself for the good of another is just part of the program.
With Frey's name being splattered across the Internet, Carr knew another superhero tell-all wouldn't fly. Nor could he rely on his own version of events: An addict's memory is akin to a parking meter's, without the benefit of collecting coins. "Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals," writes Carr. So, using the tools of a journalist, he set out to research his own history as a careening madman 20 years earlier in Minneapolis.
It's not the kind of adventure most would choose to embark upon. It entails interviewing those who witnessed your most embarrassing days. You play the starring role of huge asshole.
Carr came from the everyman suburbs of Minneapolis and became an everyman reporter. At 51, he represents the last of the barfly generation of journalism, before it was overrun by new ranks sporting master's degrees and testimonials about how many miles they jog each day. But while most of his colleagues could manage this nocturnal training regimen, Carr could not. For him, intoxicants could never arrive in adequate quantity. He graduated from whiskey to shooting cocaine, while pounding a Whitman's Sampler of everything between.
"Everything that brought me joy involved risk," Carr writes. "Yes, let's do mescaline, and, sure, let's wander out onto that trestle bridge hundreds of feet over the St. Croix River. I'm pretty sure we'll hear of a train if it comes, right?"
He slapped around women and was fired from jobs. He sold dope and scammed friends and family. He chalked up a moron's registry of petty arrests, once beating a cab driver for reasons he doesn't even remember. His is the tale of the garden-variety doper desperately trying to go pro, a journey replete with the high adventure and pathetic weirdness.
Yet Carr adds no sugar to his story. He allows old friends to speak at length about what a jerkoff he was, how dangerous he became to himself and others. This is a true recovery tale, where the writer is forced to call his own bullshit—and welcomes others to pile on. Carr makes no excuses for his past and avoids the sauce of victimhood and fishing-for-pity tragedy that's often slathered on confessionals.
By turns pointed, funny and philosophical, The Night of the Gun isn't a must-read, nor does in break new ground in addict lit. But it does elevate the genre, placing it in smarter, more eloquent hands.
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