Word: carr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...opening scene, with its choice of desk or drug habit, introduces one of the book's most unsettling truths: that despite Carr's recollection that he cleaned up his act to care for his newborn daughters, the more compelling factor was his professional ambition. Much of the memoir's emotional heft involves Carr's coming to terms with this idea, realizing that for him, work is, "in some twisted way, more sacred, more worthy of protection, than friends, loved ones, and family...
...this book goes, the investment pays off. Carr's voice is persuasive; he not only anticipates every potential critique of his project but also hurls each one fiercely at himself. Don't bother telling him that he's a presumptuous navel gazer for pursuing this story; he knows it. When he visits his ex-wife Kim, on whom he recklessly cheated, she refuses to talk with him about the past. It's a satisfying encounter, as we witness the head-on collision of Carr the intrepid reporter-author and Carr the self-critical and ambivalent subject. Kim's silence...
...friend, Ralph, throws a different kind of stumbling block his way. "I don't know," says Ralph, when pressed for the details of a drunken fracas in which he and Carr were involved. "You're asking one guy who is drunk and stoned if his memory matches the other guy's who's drunk and stoned...
These testimonies show that as a truth-seeking mechanism, Carr's approach is not foolproof. And it does have its narrative drawbacks. The story starts out choppy, moving back and forth within each brief chapter from Carr on crack to Carr manning the video camera. The chronological jumps cause some repetition, and Carr is not immune to the tic of capping off his vignettes with a punch line, which works better in a magazine than in a book...
...surprisingly, though, the pace relaxes when Carr reaches his recovery stage; by that point, familiar with the major players and milestones in his life, the reader can relax too. And if he lapses into clichés on occasion (he adores his daughters "madly, deeply, truly"), at other times his word choice attains a chilling precision, as when he describes the two girls on the date of their premature birth: "They weighed a bit more than a kilo, a term of art in our current context." Carr and the girls' mother had used crack during her pregnancy--he had just handed...