Was it his best friend who pulled the gun on Carr some 20 years ago when Carr - fired from a job and thrown out of a bar - tried to kick in his friend's front door and broke a window, as Carr remembered it, or was it Carr himself who held the gun?
Armed with a video camera and digital recorder, Carr revisited his old haunts and interviewed ex-girlfriends, former employers and people he did drugs with. The result is "The Night of the Gun," a memoir that traces Carr's rise from cocaine addict to single dad raising twin girls to sobered-up media columnist for the New York Times.
Critics agree, heaping praise upon "The Night of the Gun" (subtitled "A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own"). The New York Observer said Carr's first book "turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else's." Simon & Schuster is giving "The Night of the Gun" a big promotional push, with an accompanying Web site - www.nightofthegun.com - and about 75,000 initial copies of the book, published Aug. 5.
But the raves are not universal. After reading an excerpt featured as the cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Forbes.com media columnist James Brady said he doesn't plan to read Carr's book, calling it "an exercise in self-indulgent narcissism. What a waste - of talent, energy and professional competence."
Carr shrugs off Brady's criticism.
"His idea is that I should write a big long book about my glorious media career," Carr told the Associated Press in a telephone interview, "and he and about four other people would read that."
Carr, 51, said a "college tuition moment" prompted him to write his book. The twin girls Erin and Meagan that he had with a former girlfriend and cocaine dealer - identified as Anna in the book - are now 20 and attending universities in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Carr says he wrote up a book proposal "on a dare to myself" in two days. After an agent sold the idea, Carr - who lives in suburban Montclair, N.J. - traveled back to Minnesota to start the interviews. He ended up interviewing about 60 people and working on the book for three years. He took the transcribed interviews, numerous documents and pictures to his family's cabin in the Adirondacks and wrote the book last summer.
Anna, who now lives in Arizona, agreed to be interviewed, but Carr says his first wife, Kim, did not. (Carr has since remarried and has an 11-year-old daughter named Madeline with his second wife, Jill.)
"She had pushed me back out of her life once, and she didn't really feel a need to have me back in. I think she thought the book idea was stupid," Carr says.
After battling Anna for the twins' custody - and winning - Carr said "it wasn't unpleasant" to talk to her again after all these years.
"I like her and she likes me, but it's just weird. Really weird," Carr said in his raspy voice. " 'How about that scab you have on you from, you know, 20 years ago. Do you mind ripping that off and talking to me about it?' "
Comedian and actor Tom Arnold, who started his standup career in Minneapolis, was pals with Carr on the city's party circuit in the 1980s and is featured in the book. He calls Carr's story redemptive.
"He did some outrageous things, and he did some horrible things, and yet that's not who he is. ... But that's what drugs will do to you," Arnold told the AP. "He survived, and people can survive."
In the book, Carr doesn't flinch from describing his arrests (including one he didn't remember, for punching a cabbie), his trips to rehab (which turned out to be five instead of the four he remembered) and his bout with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. (Carr says his health is fine, although he's been smoking a lot because of the book - the interview is interrupted several times by his hacking cough.)
He recalls interviewing Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich (Carr uses only first names throughout his book, referring to Perpich as "Governor Rudy") and having the governor ask him about the blood dripping from Carr's nose. Carr is handed a tissue, he writes, "but it was not a one-tissue affair. I continued the interview with a huge wad up one nostril, my head filling with blood as I struggled to finish."
"If someone had lit a truth candle, and the governor had asked me why my nose was bleeding, I would have said it was because I had been sticking things up it all night long," Carr wrote.
After Carr's twins are born - 2 1/2 months premature and weighing just over 2 1/2 pounds each - he recounts an episode of leaving them trussed up in their snowsuits outside in a car as he visited a crack house in Minneapolis. Carr says such incidents convinced him that he had bottomed out and had to clean up. He entered a six-month inpatient treatment program after that.
"I hated being a bad father. I couldn't stand that, and there's nothing in my upbringing to allow for that," Carr said.
Brian Lambert, a senior editor at Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, worked with Carr at the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, a weekly alternative newspaper where Carr eventually became editor. Lambert gives Carr kudos for his "verve and vernacular" and says the book "seems to be brutally honest."
"It's pretty remarkable," Lambert says of Carr's rise. "I've told people I expected him to be dead in the 1988-89 era."
Growing up in suburban Hopkins in an Irish-Catholic family of three older brothers and three younger sisters (one sister has since died), Carr said he "wasn't born like a bratty kid or a wiseguy or a troublemaker."
"I just had a specific instance with a specific sort of allergy to mood-altering chemicals that, by the way, you know, probably 20, 30, 40 million Americans have. So it's not that uncommon. I just sort of took it to uncommon ends," Carr said.
Carr's rise in journalism parallels his recovery. After stints helming the Twin Cities Reader and the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in D.C., Carr went on to gigs writing for Inside.com, an online media news site co-founded by Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen, and New York and the Atlantic Monthly magazines before landing at the New York Times in 2002.
"I've always thought it (the Times) was a magnificent thing to read and look at. I just never pictured the likes of me working here," Carr said. "When they called it was total bolt out of the blue. It's like, 'Dude, you oughta check your phone number.' "
After 14 years of sobriety, Carr writes that he "set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded." He was booked for driving while impaired in February 2004 and spent the night in jail, dressed in a tuxedo. After another arrest while driving after drinking in September 2005, Carr writes that he went to a detox with plastic mattresses - "like a B horror flick that was scheduled to run continuously for days" - and was discharged on the fourth day.
Carr says he has maintained his sobriety since then, and writing the book has helped.
"It helped me remember, helped me look in on the wreckage of my past, and I really haven't had a thirsty day since I started working on it."
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