Carr with his three children outside his Montclair, New Jersey, home in 2005.   (Photo: Courtesy of David Carr)

David says that everyone at the top of the Times masthead has had nothing but fine words to say about The Night of the Gun. That’s not hard to believe. His book is great. But one can only imagine how Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, first reacted when he heard that David was going to write an addiction memoir, rather than a book about, for instance, Iraq or globalization or the CIA. (Shortly before the excerpt ran in the Sunday magazine, Keller told him, “It’s going to take a few days to work its way through the python.”) David’s wife, Jill, is fond of saying (correctly) that David personifies “go big or stay home.” Yet that’s just what David did the first day the magazine started whipping through the Times Building. He stayed home.

“There’s something incredibly crass about what I’m doing,” says David, when I see him a few weeks later and ask why he hid. “There’s a whole crew of people—not just editors but reporters—that bring great credit to the institution without drawing attention to themselves. There’s something amazing and wonderful about that.”

Discretion and modesty are values that David admires, clearly. And he promised a certain discretion when he entered the building. But now, here he is, drawing attention to himself. As an addict, David certainly had no trouble describing himself as a narcissist. (The title of Chapter 21: “Diagnosis: Narcissistic Asshole.”) Now here he is, doing the most narcissistic project a journalist could possibly dream of, an exposé of himself. But what would you do if you had a stroke of genius about how to tell your own story? “The biggest reason I wrote the book, when I think about it, was that I had read others like it and thought I could do a better job,” he wrote me the Saturday morning the Times Magazine was landing on people’s doorsteps. “So I am working to enrich a modern or post-modern subgenre that prolly shouldn’t exist. In the first place.”

So if journalism got him out of his hellhole, it’s also, in some sense, allowing him to peer back down it again. David could have written a book about anything. But he chose his own tale. It’s a clever way of having his cake and eating it, a way of calling attention to his past bad behavior without actually reprising it—Look, Ma! No crack pipe!

Carr fell off the wagon after he went to the Times. “In the old building, there was something that lived in the elevators. And let’s just say it wasn’t completely life-affirming. I guess I also felt as if I’d picked up my dad’s briefcase, full of adult concerns and responsibilities.”

“Now I have to live this,” says David. “Now I have to be that guy.”

Maybe truth-telling is, for him, its own compulsion, like injecting coke. It makes it easier to live with the uglier, more dangerous parts of yourself. “He couldn’t survive without telling people the truth,” says Jayson Blair, who e-mails David from time to time. “It’s the way David has to live. It’s who he is. I don’t think there’s a middle ground.”

No middle ground: This is precisely what defines an addict, isn’t it? David’s best friend, Ed Nagle (“Fast Eddie” in the book), says it’s this quality that still draws him to David, even as a sober man. “He never throws up his arms,” says Nagle, “and says, ‘We’re done.’ ” David still closes down restaurants at 3 A.M. He still goes on concert binges (like Bonnaroo), still crams in nine holes of golf and a fishing expedition in a single afternoon. He plays in an extreme way. And he tells stories in an extreme way. So did Jayson Blair, for that matter, another recovering addict for whom there was no middle ground. The difference is that Jayson delighted in lying and David delights in telling the brutal, bitter truth—the difference, perhaps, between disgrace and grace.

I have asked David to go to the New York premiere of Mamma Mia! with me. He has no reason to go, professionally, but it’s the only interesting red-carpet event this particular week. My initial interest was in seeing him in all his fan-boy glory, doing his thing. (During Oscar season, David transforms into the Carpetbagger blogger.) But I realize, as we’re sitting in the audience, waiting for that room to go dark, that there’s an additional benefit to being here tonight: We’re seeing a chick flick. “There’s a lot of weeping when I go to the movies,” he tells me. “When the Zamboni crested the hill in Ice Princess … ” When the movie’s over, he tells all the Universal executives he liked it, “and I’m not your demo!”

The Night of the Gun may be a supremely honest book. But there are some things that even David wouldn’t or couldn’t find a way to share, and all of them, more or less, have to do with women. In some cases, he’s protecting them. Like the twins, for instance. David tells us at the end of the book that “much of the collateral damage that went with the life I chose landed on Meagan,” but he doesn’t go much further than that. He’s her father, and there are limits.

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