"'Crackhead' is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé."

New York Times writer David Carr tells his astonishingly sordid life story and then reflects on his storytelling:

Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own pratfalls in the form of memoir because they need to believe that all of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether is was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something. That impulse suggests that I don’t regret the past — it brought me here to this nice, happy place — but I’d also like to squeeze something more from it. And so I have.