ALL MY SINS MISREMEMBERED: Review of David Carr’s Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life–His Own. I’ve read a bunch of addiction memoirs this past year, and this is the one which spoke to me the most, by far. Carr is a reporter and editor (currently writing for the New York Times, but I promise not to hold that against him), and he decided to use his investigative techniques to figure out what really happened during his years of addiction to alcohol and cocaine. He did interviews and reviewed the documentary record–rehab admittance reports, police reports, all the old bad memories.

You can tell what he found from the Norman Mailer tagline he uses: “Who could tell anymore where was what? Liars controlled the locks.” Some of his mismemories turned out to make him seem worse than he’d really been–but mostly he found that he’d been much more of a thug and a loser than he’d let himself remember. He’d hurt women, made violent threats, and even after a rock-bottom night on which he left his infant twin daughters alone in the car while he smoked crack, he took months to finally get clean. (He’d remembered that as the turning point. And it was… but big trucks make wide turns, and they take some time.)

Carr’s prose style is roughed-up, not quite tabloid, with a fine streak of gallows humor. (The chapter on his relapse is titled, “Additional Research.”) The book is also deeply forgiving, with compassion toward literally everyone who crossed the path of Carr’s trainwreck: not just his first wife, the dealer, but also, for example, the people who ran his last rehab, a somewhat ramshackle affair with too much emphasis on humiliation and restriction for your own good (“There is no humility without humiliation,” as Mother Theresa said, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to take it on yourself to humble others) but a lot of genuine love and companionship. Maybe the best example of this aspect of the book is Carr’s description of Jayson Blair, whom he clearly views as a fellow addict, fellow newspaperman, and fellow human being–not a catchphrase.

Carr was raised Catholic, in a deeply loving family. I’m sure this is one reason the book spoke to me so much; I’m guessing books with more familial dysfunction will speak more to people who came from more cruel, tumultuous, or broken homes. His descriptions of his own faith, a matter of trust and need and accepting the lack of answers, struck me as powerful and poignant. I may have choked up a bit when he described lying on a couch during a period of brutal cancer treatment, listening to one of his little girls upstairs, guiding her sister through a childlike prayer to Mary. There are snapshots of the ways in which editing can be a leadership role. (I interned at the Washington City Paper while Carr was EIC there, and from my perspective he was a fantastic leader, although he gives ample evidence for an opposing point of view in the book!)

One thing which really struck me about The Night of the Gun is that although his catastrophe days make up the majority of the page count, the book feels like it’s much more about recovery and sobriety. Maybe that’s because the entire project of the book is a recovery project, so even the darkest parts are embedded in a project of rebuilding the personal integrity shattered by active addiction. It seems like a lot of memoirists fumble for words when trying to describe both the work and the joys of sobriety. There can be a sense that the mere absence of pain is such a relief, in itself, that there’s nothing left to describe, just a blank space. Carr really conveys so vividly the working, loving life of gratitude and creation and service.