I tried to be generous and split the difference between a five-star beginning and a two-star whimper of a fifth act.
The first chapters are seriously dI tried to be generous and split the difference between a five-star beginning and a two-star whimper of a fifth act.
The first chapters are seriously dazzling, and not just because the gritty subject matter (drug den robberies, crack babies, fistfights with spouses) matches Carr's hard-boiled, super-literate-private-eye storytelling style. (Carr nonchalantly invokes Proust when trying to explain the terrible joy of his first hit of cocaine in a bar bathroom.)
There is some truly brilliant insight into memory, identity, and addiction woven into his slightly mad method, which involved interviewing everyone he could track down from his past to investigate and fact-check every last detail of his "junkie memoir." And Carr explains that he did this not only because junkies (and even ex-junkies) are unreliable narrators, but because memoir is a deeply flawed genre in need of some heavy-duty journalistic underpinning, which is not a tough sell in the age of James Frey and Herman Rosenblat.
Carr is at his best when he's talking trash about his genre: "Dead addicts don't leave behind an uplifting tract, so the narratives are generally told by people who can go on Oprah and stand like a barker in front of their abasement." He is keenly aware of the perils of his project, but he does not back down before them, choosing instead to barrel into them with candor and humor: "If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote I was recovered addict who obtained custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare, and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we're talking."
Which begs the question (which Carr loses no time in asking): why write a junkie memoir at all, however gussied up in journalistic finery? Carr's embarrassment at his own narcissism is palpable, especially when doing things like taping the interview with the washed-up mother of his children, who was smoking crack when her water broke. "Even if the conception of the memoir is venal, or commercial, or flawed, there is intrinsic value in reporting," he insists, and soldiers on despite misgivings.
Maybe this was unavoidable, but the project begins to peter out, or rather sink under its own expanding sense of self-importance, as the memoir wears on. It doesn't ever get maudlin, but the ending edges toward a smarminess you'd hoped unsentimental Carr would successfully avoid.
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