by David Carr
First published 2008
David Carr turns his journalistic skills on himself to examine his years as a crack addict and his path to becoming a New York Times columnist. Armed with sixty videotaped interviews, medical records, and three years of investigation, Carr discovers that his memories tell convenient lies. The night his friend pulled a gun to make him leave? Carr was holding the weapon. His profitable cocaine dealing? Actually a dangerous failure. His quick transformation into a responsible parent after his twins arrived? The timeline doesn't match the evidence. His lawyer's files reveal that winning custody was far more complicated than he remembered. Even after fourteen years of sobriety, Carr's experiment with social drinking leads to more arrests, including a night in jail wearing a tuxedo. Through rigorous reporting, Carr uncovers how memory reshapes our past to help us survive it.
Genres: addiction, autobiography, biography-memoir, journalism
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
385 pages · Hardcover · Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: addiction, drug-use