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Reporter Unsettled by His Investigation of His Dark Past

While cementing his life as a substance abuser in Minneapolis during his teen years, David Carr crossed the state line to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

"My crowning achievement came early," Carr writes. "As a freshman, I won the beer-chugging contest, drinking five 12-ounce beers in under 20 seconds....I stayed for two years and moved in with a lovely girl, Lizbeth, whom I soon wore out. I ended up working at a local nursing home, where I found myself the lone male on night shifts full of townie girls. It was a good life until one night when I was doing laundry at one of their trailers, and the ex-husband came by drunk as a goat and pointed a gun at me. I left town soon afterward."

A successful writer for The New York Times today, Carr could have kept his decades of personal demons to himself and hardly anybody would have known the pain he had caused himself, his family and his friends. Instead, Carr felt compelled to write down the degradation of his life for book buyers everywhere in The Night of the Gun.

Despite the soul searching, it's not entirely clear why he decided to join the legions of tell-all memoirists, sharing his abuse of alcohol, cocaine, crack, girlfriends and wives.

Carr's unique way of researching a memoir will give new meaning to accuracy in an era of fiction passing as fact. Because Carr writes about the media, he is acutely aware of the controversies surrounding the veracity of memoirs.

Perhaps the most poignant of all the forays for truth involves the 24-hour period that gave rise to the book's title. While interviewing childhood friend Donald, the author wanted to hear an honest account of a night when violence loomed.

Carr vividly recalled Donald warning against coming by, apparently because Donald could tell from a phone conversation that Carr had been abusing substances and might become uncontrollable. "Hearing the quiet menace in my voice," Carr recalls, "he told me not to come over, that he had a gun." Carr went anyway, and bitterness ensued. Donald called the police.

When Carr related his version to Donald recently, Donald "said it was all true, except the part about the gun. 'I never owned a gun,' he said. 'I think you had it.'"

That statement shook Carr. He could not remember owning a gun, could not bear to think of himself as "a gun guy." Additional reporting led Carr to understand that he carried a gun that night. "If I was wrong about the gun, what else was I wrong about?" Carr mused. A lot, as it turned out. And almost every bit of it carries a lesson.

Biographer Steve Weinberg teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.