His daughter Erin Lee Carr, a documentary filmmaker, has now written a memoir, “All That You Leave Behind,” that chronicles the highs and lows of their relationship. There’s inspiration in the reminiscence, in the form of encouraging emails and pep talks from father to daughter, and even a list of lessons learned at the end of the book, starting with “Listen when you enter a room” and “Don’t buy into your myth.” But as her father did in his own memoir, “The Night of the Gun,” Carr doesn’t shy away from darker truths. “When I was growing up, my dad often whispered to us, ‘Everything good started with you,’” Carr writes. “I realized the converse truth — that there must’ve been an ‘everything bad’ before there was an everything good.” Below, Carr talks about becoming comfortable expressing negative things, how her experience in filmmaking helped her write the book and more.
(This interview has been condensed and edited.)
Q: When did you first get the idea to write this book?
A: I was with my father the night he died. He was moderating a panel in New York with journalist Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (by way of Skype). I noticed he seemed tired after the conversation, but I didn’t press it. He left to go back to The Times to pick up his backpack before heading to the family house in New Jersey. About an hour later, he was found unconscious at The Times and rushed to the hospital, where he was announced dead. I saw his body one last time at the hospital and his wife, Jill, and I were brought back to his friend Monie’s nearby apartment. Instinctively, I typed his name into my inbox looking for clues about what just happened. Did he ever say anything about not feeling well?
There was a birthday email he had sent to me and my twin sister — it was just the most incredible writing. I heard his voice come to me and talk to me about struggle and work and doing the next right thing after something bad had happened.
On the one-year anniversary of his death, I quickly wrote a piece for Medium, and Random House reached out to me about writing a book. My initial reaction was: I don’t know. I just took the meeting because my dad taught me to always take the meeting. I have a career as a documentary filmmaker, and I’m very much grooving along in that path. And so I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to share his epic emails. But a lot of our back and forth was about sobriety. He was sober, and I was struggling with alcoholism. And I thought: Do I really want to say this aloud?
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
A: It really made me think about my alcohol and drug use in a different way. I kept thinking drug addiction was crack addiction — it was violence and your life being ripped apart and waking up not knowing who you are. I thought if that’s what addiction looks like, that’s not what I was doing. I was working at Vice, and every night buying an economical bottle of white wine and slowly blacking out.
I remembered a moment when my dad took me out to get pizza, and I thought: This will be fun; we’ll eat and gossip about media. And he said, “You can either be a big deal in your own right or have a drinking problem for the next 10 years and be of little significance.” I was dumbstruck. It felt really scary to be seen in that way. I knew this was a dividing moment, and that I couldn’t just lie to myself and tell myself everything was OK. I felt maybe there was a way to affect a reader who has struggled with their dad or with drinking too much, but it doesn’t look the way society taught us it does.
Q: In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
A: From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck — freaked out by the blank page. So I started to use my skills as a filmmaker. I note-carded it. I had the notes above my computer, and I got to do a little “X” when I finished the draft of a chapter; it was this really satisfying moment.
I turned the note cards into a first draft, and then thought: This is too rosy. I had really deep guilt about writing anything negative about him, because he’s not here. But that is so not David Carr. So I just typed out these phrases, like “I’m mad at you,” to see how it would feel.
I believe his expectations were out of sync with reality. He would say things like, “I expect you to change the world,” because he wanted to do that and I was kind of his protégé. There’s a story where we were on vacation and I was being a jerk and complaining about things. And he said to me, “Looking at you is like looking into a dirty mirror.” I remember that stinging in the moment, and stinging when I was writing it. It shows that he wanted me to be a mirror image of himself, but was disturbed when it actually looked like him.
Q: Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
A: Since I can’t say a writer, I can’t say my dad, but he influences every day of my life, which is a beautiful thing.
I’m a freelancer, so I spend a lot of time by myself. I start the day with a chapter or two from Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: Women at Work.” It gives cheerful summaries about how some of the most prolific, successful artists managed their time. One of my favorites from a couple of days ago was an entry featuring photographer Diane Arbus. Her gig for money revolved around shooting commercial portraits, but for pleasure she trolled parties, nudist colonies and psychiatric institutions in search of her desired subjects. There’s something about attempting to find the unlikely, unusual subject that resonates. “Find the underdog” has always made sense to me.
Q: Persuade someone to read “All That You Leave Behind” in 50 words or less.
A: I love to ask people the mistakes they made and what they learned. This book’s a tribute to my dad’s mistakes and to doing the next right thing. It’s about getting fired, getting sober and struggling with relationships — and the deep love that happens as you work through those things.
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Publication Notes:
‘All That You Leave BehindA Memoir’By Erin Lee CarrIllustrated. 240 pages. Ballantine Books. $26.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.