The Audio Book Club on The Night of the Gun.

The Audio Book Club on The Night of the Gun.

The Audio Book Club on The Night of the Gun.

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Oct. 9 2008 3:54 PM

The Audio Book Club on The Night of the Gun

Our critics discuss David Carr's memoir.

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of David Carr's The Night of the Gun, click the arrow on the player below.

You can also download the audio file here, or click hereto subscribe to the Slate Audio Book Club feed in iTunes.

This month, the Audio Book Club ventures into R-rated territory with a discussion of The Night of the Gun, by David Carr. The story of Carr's descent into alcoholism and drug dependency, The Night of the Gun is, on the one hand, a typical addiction-and-recovery memoir. But Carr tries to add a new twist to the old genre by relying on his reporting skills, rather than just his memory, to reconstruct a more accurate personal history. Now a New York Times columnist, Carr interviews his friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, and digs through his old medical records in search of objective truth. Does Carr succeed at leaving convention behind? The 45-minute conversation explores this question and many others.

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If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Watch for—and listen to—our Audio Book Club about The Great Gatsby in November.

You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed, or by clicking on the links below *:

Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com. (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)

*  To download the MP3 file,right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.

Meghan O’Rourke is Slate’s culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at the New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother’s death, is now out in paperback.

Troy Patterson is Slate’s writer at large and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

Katie Roiphe, professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is the author of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages and In Praise of Messy Lives.