David Carr - Final Draft: The Collected Work of David Carr

Copyright 2020 by Jill Rooney Carr

Foreword copyright 2020 by Ta-Nehisi Coates

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph Chester Higgins Jr. /New York Times / Redux

Author photograph courtesy of Jill Rooney Carr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carr, David, 19562015, author. | Carr, Jill Rooney, editor.

Title: Final draft : the collected work of David Carr / edited by Jill Carr.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019038033 (print) | LCCN 2019038034 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358206682 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358310303 | ISBN 9780358310389 | ISBN 9780358171928 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: JournalismUnited States. | Mass mediaUnited States. | United StatesCivilization1970

Classification: LCC PN 4725 . C 355 2020 (print) | LCC PN 4725 (ebook) | DDC 070.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038033

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038034

v1.0320

Permission credits appear on .

WHEN MY HUSBAND , David Carr, died shortly after collapsing in the New York Times newsroom in 2015, so many of us grieved an epic lossof a father, a life partner, a brother, a colleague, a friend, an extraordinary reporter and writer. Simply put, David was a glorious carnival of a human being, a guy who really lived three or four lives in his fifty-eight years.

In the aftermath of his death, I found that his words were still with me. I reread his magazine pieces, his spot-on profiles, his reporting in Hollywood for the Times (as the Carpetbagger, a mission he completed, mingling with show business media and film aristocracy in a $169 tux). David could go high, he could go low, and everywhere in between because he was fearless and deeply curious about the human condition.

His writing was a great comfort to me. His voice was so distinct, so original, you often didnt need to see the byline to know it was him. As time passed, I stopped feeling like I was falling backwards down the stairs. Grief has a way of destroying us, but little by little we climb back to a place where we are hollow but eventually capable of finding joy and wonder.

Over the last year I found myself gravitating to Davids earlier work, the stories he wrote in Minnesota before I met him and those published in the early years of our life together. There was a desire to connect again with the remarkable man I fell in love with on the first date, a single father of twin girls, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.

I cherish this diverse collection of work because it features the David I knew long before he became an icon of American journalism. The articles reveal what many would later see as trademark David Carr: an utterly bold approach to reporting, a desire to find the hidden truths people arent eager to share and then write their stories, richly detailed, perhaps from a vantage point you hadnt considered. At his core, David was both a card-carrying contrarian and an empath in equal measure.

This trove reveals so much of David: a man of intense passions, strong convictions, and an appreciation for those among us who dont opt for the straight path. I believe these pieces are proof that David approached writing as a vocation. He really didnt have a choice in it.

Enjoy these treasures, large and small. For me, its always a thrill to visit with David Carr.

Jill Rooney Carr

ITS STILL ODD , after all these years, for me to think of David Carr as a writer. The broader world knew him as a writer, of course, and an accomplished one. David had a sprawling career that found him writing for alternative papers, doing longform magazine work at The Atlantic, New YorkMagazine, and Washington Monthly, and then finally as a writer for the New York Times, where he did everything from essays to straight news to (perhaps most famously) a column covering media. In 2008 he published a bookTheNight of the Gun, an ingenious memoir in which David interrogated his own memory by interviewing the characters interspersed throughout his own rousing biography. Along the way, David cultivated sources and readers, collected friends, and enraged enemies. It is an enviable record, one that speaks for itself.

But there was the David the world knew and the one I knew. I met that latter David when I was a twenty-year-old faltering college student who had some vague ambition of being a writer. David was then one year into his stint as editor of the Washington City Paper and was, most importantly for my purposes, hiring interns for the summer. My application was underwhelminga chapbook of poetry and some middling columns and reporting Id done for my college newspaper. But David was looking high and low for storytellers, and he did not much care how or where he found them. I was hired for the summer, then extended as a staff writer, and for the next three years David both invigorated and terrified me.

Davids staff skewed under thirty, and among them I was distinguished neither by talent or hard work. But David invested in me, if not in dollars, then in something more precioustime. He line-edited much of my earliest workshifting sections, urging me on with comments, threshing wheat from the chaff. He was a stickler for names and factsand if you missed one, he would think nothing of yelling at you and threatening your meager livelihood. I wonder now if all of that yelling was necessary. Probably not. But you take the bad with the good, and there was so much good.

David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it rightwhen you wrote something that made him smilehed make you feel like youd hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week. I was a kid who had never felt like hed done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be good (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasnt just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. Hed introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. Hed clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: This is the level of work I expect of you.

That kind of care and regard for young writers rarely happened in the 90s, when I met David, and happens even less now. And what followed in the wake of that mentorship was just as rareDavid became my friend. What I remember are dinners out in Montclair with the Carr girls, lunches where hed dispense the latest media gossip, pancakes at his cabin upstate. David didnt just love me, he loved my wife and my son. He always asked about them and would amuse them both with his wild stories and unique vocabularyCarr-isms, we called them. If hed been working especially long hours, David would say hed been in the weeds all week. Or if he had some secret to bestow, hed say this is just girls talking. Later this evolved into taking a trip out to girl-island. Carr-isms aside, David had an inbuilt sense of the significance of family ritual that I lacked. You didnt go visit the Carrs and sit around and watch TV. You played touch football. You hiked. You rode bikes.