Reporter Unsettled by His Investigation of His Dark Past
A review by Steve Weinberg
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...
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