Word: memoirs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fortunate not to meet their fates - both died of drug overdoses - Ian had her own tumultuous life. She attempted suicide, went broke, survived an abusive marriage, wrote and performed another megahit, At Seventeen, and became a lesbian activist. Ian, 57, recounts this and more in her new memoir, Society's Child (Tarcher/Penguin). TIME reached Ian at her home in Nashville...
...Every memoir is in one sense an argument--a writer's version of his or her past. But, as readers who cashed in their debunked copies of A Million Little Pieces know, recent memoirs have been just as notable for the arguments they raise about the intersection of fact, truth and memory...
Attuned to these and other pitfalls of inaccuracy (he was friends with Jayson Blair at the Times), Carr sets out to "report" his memoir, which is to say he digs up his medical and police files and conducts some 60 interviews with people who knew him then and know him now, from his parents to his rehab counselors to his grownup twin daughters. Wary of painting a distorted self-portrait, he offers up a researched composite instead...
...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...
...that one--when coke and kids mix, brought together in Carr's life and his language--that you realize how successfully he has woven his tale. If the reporting device started out as a "fig leaf," to keep him from obsessing about "adding to a growing pile of junkie memoirs," it doesn't end up that way. The Night of the Gun is in part a writerly exercise in defense and disarmament--memoir in the throes of an existential crisis. But that does not prevent it from being a great read. This is largely because, in using his reporter...