RA Crossroads No. 8
David Carr's The Night of the Gun
By Neal Wyatt -- Library Journal, 9/19/2008 9:30:00 AM
As Lewis Carroll’s Alice so aptly points out, "What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?" Welcome to RA Crossroads, where books, movies, music, and other media converge and whole-collection reader’s advisory service goes where it may. In this column, David Carr's The Night of the Gun leads me down a winding path.
A slippery mix of memory and perception, the memoir is a genre in a state of flux. With the
recent publication of David Carr’s The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own, it forges a path not often taken these days, memory rigorously backed by fact.Carr intermingles journalism with sharp, darkly funny writing. While there have been few such documented memoirs, David Sheff's Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction employs a certain level of a reporter's attention to detail. Jeannette Walls's luminous The Glass Castle has the same forthright punch as Carr’s book and also manages that hint of self-imposed distance.
But distanced and documented are not for everyone. Certainly not for David Sedaris, who calls his most recent
book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, "realish." Sedaris has expanded the memoir in his own way, blending into autobiographical essay enough family fodder and personal history to join the memoir party. He offers readers (and listeners—his audio readings are fabulous) a riot of stories, sharply told with droll genius. Try Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake and Laurie Notaro's The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death for more brilliantly funny self-reflection.
Letters—stay with me—are great reading, often more vibrantly honest than the most fact-checked memoir. The most famous set of American letter writers is John and Abigail Adams. Try My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor.
More modern masters of the epistolary form were the Whites, as in E.B. and his wife, Katharine. Like the Adamses, the Whites wrote smart, generous letters that revealed much about their character and inner lives. Try Letters of E.B. White published by
Harper and Emily Herring Wilson's Two Gardeners: Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence; A Friendship in Letters. If you like the warmth, charm, and grace of the White and Lawrence exchanges, then consider Patricia Lamb and Kathryn Hohlwein's Touchstones: Letters Between Two Women, 1953–1964.Then there's the blog post, a cross between a diary entry and
a chain letter. Try Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen to see how memoir reinvents itself yet again.Finally, not to be left out of the game entirely, novelists have been known to take a perfectly good fact and turn it into fiction. The body of books loosely termed fictional biographies makes for a nice alternative to exhausting reality. Consider Bill Brooks's The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid for its inventive look at a legend and Martha Sherrill's The Ruins of California to see what happens when an author starts a memoir and then finds that it needs to be a novel. Or dip into Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society to read invented letters and invented lives.
