“The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own” by David Carr
Paperback, 387 pages
Published 2009 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10 : 1416541535 | ISBN-13 : 978-1416541530
Date Finished: October 22, 2015
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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David Carr had a hand in mentoring some of the famous journalists you know today, including Ta Nehisi Coates. He was, of course, a legendary New York Times journalist himself, and his circuitous path to the top of the news world is the subject of his book. A former crack addict, Carr goes back through his own history to fact-check what he remembers about his darker years, and what he finds is shocking. This book is a journalistic lesson in the fallibility of memory and a testament to Carr’s brilliance.
My Notes:
Every hangover begins with an inventory.
In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky explains that recollection—memory, even—is fungible, and often leaves out unspeakable truths, saying, “Man is bound to lie about himself.
Donald is not prone to lies. He has his faults: He has wasted a gorgeous mug and his abundant talent on whiskey and worse, but he is a sea-up guy, and I have seen hi bullshit only when the law is involved.
In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, S is the relative strength of the memory, and T is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled until they become little more than chimeras. People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.
I did not date women, I took hostages.
Shakespeare describes memory as the warder of the brain, but it is also its courtesan. We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future. The prototypes of the lit—white, grievous, practical—make themselves known when memory is called to answer.
Truly ennobling personal narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.
the moments when I stumbled across a life-changing epiphany are vividly preserved, while the more corrosive aspects are lost to a kind of self-preserving amnesia.
It was a profoundly embarrassing exercise, but it brought with it no small number of epiphanies. I was wrong about a lot of things. In the novelized version of my life, I was basically a good guy who took a couple of wrong turns and ended up in the ditch. In the reported version, I was a person who saw the sign that said dangerous curves ahead and floored it, heedlessly mowing down all sorts of people at every turn.
A new frontier in the annals of self-involvement.
It is a lifestyle that leaves marks: the scar from the casual swipe of the bo cutter during some beef, the burned extremity because he or she went to sleep with the blowtorch on, and the eyes that saw too much because they did not close often enough.
Daniel L. Schacter wrote in the Seven Sins of Memory, “We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences—unknowingly or unconsciously—in light of what we now know or believe.”
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie writes about the “special kind” of truth that memory conjures. “It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also. But in the end it creates its own reality, its own heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events, and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.
I am a good man who did bad things, but I’m better now.
The God thing was weird. All the theological debate seemed at one remove, and a higher power was in our midst simply because we needed one to be there. It solves some practical issues—I had no time to come up with my own version of a creation myth, so that all-powerful God of the Catholic realms that I had been raised on came in very handy.
It was a full-on assault. There’s no other way to describe it. Your ambition and your energy and your every move are calibrated very closely. You don’t look like one, but you are a climber.
I’ve watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?
I was cancer free, working out at the Y, and was no longer fat, drunk, or addicted. Not a catch, exactly, but not nothing.
I took their manifest disrespect as a kind of provocation. They were, collectively, smarter than me. But tougher? Not so much.
When I moved to work in New York, I asked my pal Amanda how she thought I’d like it. “It’s a high. And if you want the fight, it’s great. And if you don’t want the fight, it sucks.”
Barring a necessary and opposing force, the obsession that lives in an addict is always in the basement, doing push-ups, waiting for an opening.
I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.
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