Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Journalist David Carr led a life filled with countless bad days, memories he isn’t too proud of, and plenty nights he has little memory of, like the one he calls ‘The Night of the Gun,’ which doubles up as the title of his memoir. At its core, it’s a straightforward, even if deeply disturbing story: a man spirals into destructive behavior under the grip of addiction, then ultimately claws his way to sobriety and a stable, successful life.
David starts off by remembering a night he got into a fight with his best-friend after getting high at a bar. Later the same night, he turned up at the friend’s door but was met with a gun and a call to the cops. The author recalls feeling ashamed that his ‘best-friend’ would point a gun at him, but years later, when he discusses the night, the friend asserts it was David who had the gun, not him. Hence the title, ‘The Night of the Gun’.
“What else was I wrong about?” David wonders. So amid a sea of memoirs about drugs, and addiction, the one thing that sets apart ‘The Night of the Gun’ from other books in the genre is the fact that David Carr ‘fact checks’ his memories. He goes about interviewing people from both his past and present, which include friends, family, fellow journalists, ex girlfriends, and a bunch of others personalities he crossed paths with. More often than not, they way they remember the same event is wildly different from David’s own personal recollection.
And here’s the thing, David was under the influence of drugs half the time, but those around him weren’t always sober either, so as a reader, you cannot really trust any version. People like to remember things the way it suits them, it’s something the author himself says a few times across ‘The Night of the Gun’ – which makes this a highly unreliable account through and through.
“Even if I had amazing recall, and I don’t, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of its reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other “memories” are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present” – David Carr says in the first few pages of the book.
David Carr peddled drugs, violently beat some of his partners, got arrested a bunch of times, left his twin toddlers in his car to do lines of cocaine at a party, was constantly in and out of rehab, and failed those around him multiple times. At no point of reading ‘The Night of the Gun’ could I get myself to like the author, although his candid confessions of his own awful behavior is admirable. Lucky for him that he was a privileged white man, with supportive parents and partners who never slammed the door on his face, so he could abuse his own body long enough until better sense somehow prevailed upon him.
If there were a trophy for surviving your own recklessness, David would have it on his mantel. No matter how he packages his redemption arc, especially the well-worn “I changed for my daughters” angle, the throughline is unmistakable: he was incredibly lucky. Lucky he didn’t overdose. Lucky he didn’t kill himself or someone else driving intoxicated. Lucky none of his shady contacts decided to silence him permanently. What stands out most, though, is that he doesn’t hide how ugly he can be. In fact, the deeper you go into the ‘Night of the Gun’, the worse it gets.
How did a drug addict with a dubious history even get to be a New York Times journalist? Well, apparently he was a great reporter, something he not so humbly brags about throughout the course of ‘Night of the Gun’. So even if his personal life was incredibly shit, he would somehow manage to turn in great stories, saleable enough to impress the right editors. And sure, you can see in this memoir that the man can write, but the memoir can also feel repetitive at points, with lots of anecdotes that could’ve been scrapped.
It took me a few weeks to read this memoir, which really didn’t match up to my hopes and expectations for the memoir. Yes, David Carr led an interesting life, but his ‘fact checking’ approach to the memoir remains both intriguing and dubious.
Get ‘Night of the Gun’ if the premise sounds interesting.
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