Is David Carr a Truth Junkie? -- New York Magazine

What Do Crack Cocaine and Journalism Have in Common?

Carr with his friend Donald postcollege at a bar in Minneapolis.

(Photo: Courtesy of David Carr)

Really? But he mentioned quite a bit of tomcatting …

“Yeah, but when I went back and interviewed all my friends from then,” he said, “a lot of times, they’re talking about me and girls.” So unlovely was his behavior that readers of early drafts of his book recommended he skip certain stories—they tapped the narrative off its orbit, rendering him less good guy than brute. “People said, ‘There’s enough sort of misogyny and objectification without this kind of fratty stuff,’ ” he said. “It made me seem like a thug and a player, and that was one tick of grossness too many.”

All of which raises the question: Who is this guy? To meet David today, you’d never suspect he’d have been capable of such awfulness. He comes across as integrated and true, professional and secure: a media columnist and Oscars blogger, a New Jersey homeowner, a father of three, a husband of a former aide to a Republican senator. (To scandalized liberals, he usually adds, “I didn’t know Jill didn’t give a shit about poor people until I married her.”) His past seems safely behind him, a furry monster securely nailed beneath a trap door. It never occurred to me that this monster might be an angry troll, or that it might still scratch at the surface once in a while, begging for air.

Yet at the end of the book, David declares outright, “I’m not normal.” And indeed, by the end of the book—what in movie terms would be known as the third act—he confirms his self-diagnosis, revealing that in 2002, after almost fourteen years of sobriety, he began to drink again, heavily. Only Mnookin knew the full extent of his recidivism. His own brother, whom David had urged for years to quit drinking, had no clue. “It turned out that all the time he was encouraging me, he’d been in various stages of relapse,” says John Carr, who works for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

So was this the monster rearing his buried head or just a garden-variety midlife crisis? (Given David’s extraordinary past, he probably wouldn’t have recognized anything so banal as a midlife crisis.) And if, as David writes, he’s truly “a maniac who simply enjoys the fruits of acting normal,” what on earth does he do all day, one day at a time, to subdue Mr. Hyde? “It’s a great dramatic point in the narrative, that I face-plant,” David tells me. “But it’s not so good for me personally. I’m coming up on three years sober. I don’t want my employers or colleagues to think I’m a basket case.”

So unlovely was his behavior toward women that readers of early drafts of his book recommended he skip certain stories—they tapped the narrative off its orbit, making him seem less good guy than brute. “You want me to say you’re a nice guy,” said one woman he’d known in the old days. “You’re not.”

Just a couple of weeks before his book excerpt goes online, I meet David in the lobby of the new Times Building. He’s looked pretty much the same over the seven years I’ve known him—shirt tucked in over his gut, gut hanging over his pants, neck sloped like a serpent’s. He’s just had three big stories run in the space of 24 hours, totaling 6,300 words. “There’s something to the theory of mania replacing mania,” he says. And compulsion replacing compulsion, he might have added: When he recently wrote a media column slamming Fox News, he got 450 e-mails, and he answered each and every one. “And why would I do that?” he asks. “There’s a weirdness to it. Like if I don’t, flying monkeys will attack.”

David has a former crackhead’s approach to news. He’s always in pursuit of stimulation, always needing more more more. (In The Night of the Gun, he says that’s what he used to call coke, back in the day, as in, “You got any more?”) In his book, he talked about being terrified of missing something, and his career at the Times has some of that: a ravenous quality, with his chewing variously on the subjects of media, movies, music, politics. This fear of missing something also means he figured out Web journalism a lot faster than his colleagues. He has one of the Times’ most readable blogs; he was one of the first to make himself a video star on nytimes.com, doing meta-interviews with celebrities and regular Joes. (He has the “Beetlejuicy” personality for it, as Kurt Andersen, the novelist and public-radio host, so aptly puts it—all nerve endings and bounce.)

There’s a psychedelic quality, too, to David’s writing and speech, a facility with metaphor that reminds us his synapses might have seen a few extra chemicals in their day. (Two of my favorite workplace Davidisms: Outsize jerks in the office are “asymmetrical threats”; fighting your boss is “throwing spitballs at a battleship.”) “His voice bears a relation to the dialogue in Deadwood,” says Andersen. “This mixture of grotesque profanity and quasi-Shakespearean orotundity. And then there’s all this really weird custom-made slang. When we first met, he talked about ‘adjacencies.’ ” David still uses that one, actually, as in, Eva Braun was adjacent to a greater evil, Adolf Hitler. “To people who don’t know him,” says Andersen, “it’s, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ ”