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

What Do Crack Cocaine and Journalism Have in Common?

But in some cases, David’s omissions aren’t about protecting the innocent; they’re about preserving the integrity of the author. Certain female characters dropped out of the book because he couldn’t find a way to write about them without looking like a creep. He mentions an HIV-positive woman, for instance, whose affections he toyed with, then hurt. “I’d have had to see her”—for an interview, he means, for the book—“and she hates my guts. She said, ‘You want me to say you’re a nice guy. You’re not.’ ”

To any woman who knows him now, these reports of insensitivity and misogyny are pretty shocking. David’s always had lots of female friends. He’s surrounded by girls at home. Most of all, David adores his wife. Meet her once and you get it: She’s his equal and opposite number, funny in similar ways, no-nonsense in similar ways, very smart. If you aren’t in a decent relationship yourself, a night out with the two of them can send you straight to the liquor cabinet.

So the transition from jerk to great husband is, in my book, the real redemptive story in David’s life, even if it’s a less dramatic one than kicking a coke habit. And he never fully explains how it happened in The Night of the Gun. He says he fell in love, simple as that. Maybe. And maybe time, maybe sobriety, maybe the help of therapists, maybe the cancer. He has no patience for the question, ultimately—the answer doesn’t involve great yarns, his favorite currency, but internal shifts. “Didn’t Freud say that Irish people are generally immune to psychoanalysis?” he asks.

But David isn’t above a bit of depth psychology. “Carl Jung suggested that until we embrace both our masculine and feminine sides, we can’t be made whole,” he writes. “For all the testosterone I have deployed in my affairs, I experienced salvation in expressing common maternal behavior.”

But that was the first time around, right? His girls saved him. In fact, lots of women saved him. The lawyer who helped him get custody of his twins was a woman—she more or less taught him how to parent. His therapist after he sobered up was a woman. His mother came by every week to do laundry and fill the fridge. His sister Coo spent long stretches at his place to take care of the girls. He writes lovingly about his twins’ day-care provider, a hugely meaningful part of their family. A woman too.

But by the time David started drinking again, a lot of those women were dying or gone. His book is filled with female ghosts. His mom died of lung cancer. The day-care provider died of cancer. Coo died of an aneurysm. His daughters were teenagers, in full independence mode, and no longer required his ministrations in quite the same way. And the Times, he says, may be the one workplace in his life where he has no office spouse. In fact, he seems to have few female confidantes these days. In the first draft of his book, he thanks virtually no women in the “work” and “life” sections of the acknowledgments. “I know, I know, I stared at that list and said, What a sausage fest, ” he says. “It’s unbelievable.”

So maybe David wrote this book because he missed his inner monster. But maybe, you know, he just wanted to talk. The confessional’s a pretty girlish art form. And his excerpt certainly got female attention. The day it first started to snake through the magazine’s editorial strata, he told me, “No dudes want to talk. All women.”

His brother John has a vivid memory from twenty years ago. It was just before David bottomed out and showed up at his parents’ house at 3 a.m., twins in his arms, heading to rehab for the fifth time. David was still running wild then. “I remember very clearly my mother saying, ‘I want David hurt so bad he changes, but I don’t want him to die,’ ” says John. Years later, at their mother’s funeral, John remembers looking around the church at all her children. “The joke among us was that she loved me the best,” he says. “But you know, there was a good chance that David was that guy.” Inspiring desperate anger followed by the deepest love—that seems to be the theme and general arc of David’s life. There’s probably still a monster rattling around inside somewhere. But who would David be without him?