The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's culture critic, and joining me today are Troy Patterson, the television critic of Slate.

Hi.

Hi.

And Katie Roifie, a professor at NYU and a regular contributor to the audiobook club.

Welcome, Katie.

Thank you.

Today, we're discussing The Night of the Gun, a memoir by David Carr, which is subtitled,

A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, His Own.

It's the story of Carr's descent into alcohol and drug addiction

in Minneapolis, mostly in Minneapolis, in the 1980s, and a time when he was working as a reporter

at various newspapers and alternative journals and basically became not only a heavy drinker, but a heavy user of cocaine, crack cocaine,

and then also would inject cocaine, and eventually lost his job and ended up in and out

of several rehab organizations.

And so on the one hand, this would seem to be kind of a typical recovery memoir,

that category that includes James Fry's A Million Little Pieces and many others. On the other hand,

this is a memoir that's very much trying to distinguish itself from the category of recovery

memoir by using the tool of reporting. The conceit of the book is that this is not just

Carr remembering things and

telling us about them. It's him going back and actually interviewing and videotaping all of the

people he knew then, his associates and his friends and his family, with the idea of coming up with

...