After a spate of so-called memoirs being exposed as occasionally fictitious accounts of “truthiness,” New York Times columnist David Carr spent three years of verifying and fact-checking his recollection of his former life as a coke-dealing crack-house regular before his improbable rise as a, well, New York Times columnist, which is a pretty cherry gig, especially for a crackhead.

The result is “The Night of the Gun,” which sounds like a good title for a crazy incident based on hazy memory and conflicting accounts that finally wound up in a marginally literate police report. (We’ve read enough police reports to find this term — marginally literate police report — almost redundant.)
Carr’s account includes 60 interviews and the examination of hundreds of medical, legal and personal documents.

For those of us who have led secret lives while leading seemingly normal lives, this is probably a how-to guide of survival as a crack user and recovery guide.

A prominent media critic, Carr probably wanted to be sure his account was as bulletproof as a memoir can be by getting third-party corroboration of events as he remembers them. And, seriously, when you have a nose- or lung-full of cocaine, you need a little backup.
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