Copyright © 2019 by Erin Lee Carr
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Carr, Erin Lee, author.
Title: All that you leave behind: a memoir / Erin Lee Carr.
Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059597| ISBN 9780399179716 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399178986 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Carr, David, 1956–2015. | Carr, Erin Lee. | Journalists—United States—Biography. | Recovering addicts—United States—Biography. | Fathers and daughters—United States.
Classification: LCC HV5805.C356 A55 2019 | DDC 362.29/8092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059597
Ebook ISBN 9780399178986
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Rachel Ake
Cover images: courtesy of the author
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Chapter 1: The Blue House
Chapter 2: Rain Check
Chapter 3: The Night in Question
Chapter 4: The Ghost in You
Chapter 5: It All Starts Somewhere
Chapter 6: The Other Woman
Chapter 7: Rites of Passage
Chapter 8: How (Not) to Intern
Chapter 9: Something New
Chapter 10: Holiday Party Advice
Chapter 11: Far from the Tree
Chapter 12: The House of Many Felled Trees
Chapter 13: Stories Are There for the Telling
Chapter 14: Tyranny of Self
Chapter 15: Choose Wisely
Chapter 16: The Criers Get Nothing
Chapter 17: Sometimes You Get Both Barrels
Chapter 18: Gut Check
Chapter 19: Liability
Chapter 20: Ninety Days
Chapter 21: SOS
Chapter 22: Jelly Beans
Chapter 23: The Experiment
Chapter 24: The Water Has It Now
Chapter 25: The Wake
Chapter 26: His Second Act
Chapter 27: Traces
Chapter 28: The Upside of Getting Fired
Chapter 29: Chatter
Chapter 30: The Castle Without Its El Rey
Chapter 31: If It’s Not Getting Better, Consider the Alternative
Chapter 32: Resentments
Chapter 33: Sad Girl’s Guide
Chapter 34: A Glacier First Melts at the Edges
Things I Learned from David Carr: A List
Books I Read While Writing This Book
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
You know I’m not going to live forever. I won’t be holed up in some hospital bed, dying slowly of lung cancer. You’ll be the one to put the pillow over my face, right?
—DAVID CARR, DECEMBER 2014
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I know you know the drill but here it is: Some names and places have been changed to protect individual privacy. Memory is a fickle creature, but I have, to the best of my ability, remained true to the past, as it is available to me. The emails, Gchats, and texts are reminders of what happened and when. I am so grateful for their existence.
1
The Blue House
When I think back to my early childhood home in Minneapolis, my brain conjures up a dim outline of a blue house on Pillsbury Avenue. While it is hard to remember the exact details of the house, the memories of its inhabitants come quite easily. I can picture my hands on the furniture, always trying to spread my mess out onto our sparse belongings. I see my dad putting one of our purple tutus on his head and declaring to no one in particular, “I am TUTU MONSTER,” as he scoops my sister and me up in his arms while we shriek and try to scramble out of his grasp, giggling the whole time. He had a gift for creating worlds.
Our parents shape and create our reality. For a long time we have no sense outside of their worldview.
A while back I spent some serious time digitizing hundreds of decades-old photos tucked away in ancient red photo albums so that I could pull them up in a moment’s notice. The images tell a familiar tale. Two little girls encased in baby buckets, looking up at the bad hair and fashions of the 1980s. Sometimes we are smiling in the photos. More often, though, we are not. We were born without so much as a wisp of hair, so naturally my grandma JoJo took to scotch-taping bows on our heads. She needed people to know that we were baby girls, not boys.
My mother is absent from these photos. It’s just a flurry of aunts and uncles and Mountain Dew cans. My arms are chubby, and I am often reaching out for more. There is no baby book that recounts my first words or steps, but when I asked my dad in my teendom what my first utterance was, you better bet he said DaDa.
Meagan is so tiny in these early images, her body so small it looks like she could evaporate. Our nicknames mimic our stature; as luck would have it, I am known as Beefaroni and she, Noodles. I am often captured with a bottle in hand, and in a couple of photos, trying to grab the bottle from Meagan’s hands.
There’s one photo of my dad in these albums that I studied carefully. It’s not like the others. He is in some sort of rec room, and he is standing up at a podium. He looks like he is clocking in around three hundred pounds, and he has a beard. Not exactly in fighting shape. Other men fill the room. He looks focused and nervous, photographed in midsentence.
I called Uncle Joe. He is warm and charismatic with a bald head and small circular glasses. I’d been remiss in calling. Life had gotten busy.
“Do you remember this photo?” I asked, after describing it to him. “What was he like then?”
Joe paused to think about it. I could tell that he was placating me. This was the second time in ten years he’d had to revisit a past that was very dark for his entire family. My dad spent some serious time excavating the facts of his life for his own memoir, The Night of the Gun. “Well, your dad was a mystery to us. He tried his hand at treatment on numerous occasions, and it just never seemed to stick. We knew—and I think he knew—that this time had to be different. Must have been at a meeting.”
We were the stakes. These little babies needed a parent, and my mother was not going to magically reappear from Texas or Mexico or wherever she was at that time. We needed him. “But didn’t that intensify the pressure?” I asked.
“Well, didn’t your dad always thrive under pressure?”
Why, yes, he did.
As Meagan and I age in the photos, our hair begins to grow and we go from looking like little old men to looking like little girls. Starting around age four, a soft white-and-pink checkered baby blanket starts appearing next to me, as if it were surgically attached. As I sought out other archival material from this time, I came across his column in the Family Times, a local paper that had given him some space to muse about life as a single dad. The column was aptl
y titled “Because I Said So.” In one installment, he told of how he’d turned away for a second to look for my ever-quiet sister, and before he knew it I had gotten myself into our junker of a car and started backing out of the driveway. The minor heart attacks that surround the life of a young parent astound me.
In those early days in Minnesota we were poor. We needed government assistance just to get by—something I have no shame about and am frankly grateful existed at the time. You can tell our circumstances from the backgrounds in the photos, but you definitely wouldn’t know it to look at Meagan or me. Grandma JoJo was a hawk at rummage sales and would find matching outfits (plus bonnets, no less) for us to wear for family photo ops. My dad, on the other hand, looks pretty ragged. I can see in his face that the financial fear was alive and well. He, alone, was responsible for these two little beings. Sure, his family could help here and there, but they needed their money to stay in their own pockets.
In the photos, he’s always looking at us—his daughters. He isn’t mugging for the camera, like he did in his early party-boy days. Instead, he is watchful, careful, and looks exhausted as hell. Someone caught him cracking a smile in one photo. We are at our grandparents’ and Meagan and I are standing on top of the picnic table. There are garbage bags that hold something bulky underneath. We are told to open the bag and OH MY GOD we each have our very own tricycle to ride! The next photo is me on my trike, in my Easter bonnet, grinning from ear to ear. Dad watches us with parental glee but also relief: Good, something to keep them busy.
Having twin baby girls makes you value routine. Wake up, feed them, put them down for a nap, write until you hear the sound of a laugh or cry, and clumsily make your way toward the crib. Rinse, repeat. All noted in the journal he kept back then. One daily tradition that endured throughout our time together was the song before bedtime. He would come into our room—Meagan on top, me on the bottom of our wooden bunk beds—and read us a story. Inevitably we would beg for more. Just one more! He would shake his head and say, “How about a song?” Then he would launch into his simple tune:
Oh, I’ve got the nicest girls in town
Oh, I’ve got the nicest girls in town
They are so nice, they are so sweet, I love them twice, they can’t be beat
Oh,
I’ve
Got
The
NICEST girrrrrrllsssssss in townnnnnnnn.
As a teenager I would roll my eyes when he would start in on this familiar refrain, but secretly I loved it. He would capitalize on the lore, at one point presenting both Meagan and me with a golden trophy, a gilded plaque that read NICEST GIRL IN TOWN. I wasn’t sure if I deserved the award, but I accepted it willingly.
Memories of the softness and creativity of these moments warm me. They are evidence of his fierce love, devotion, and effort when it came to his girls. I know how rare it is to be so truly considered.
To: Erin Lee Carr, Meagan Marie Carr
From: David Carr
Date: 04/15/2014
Subject: a 26th birthday thought
My precious girls,
We are now at the part I had not anticipated, the part of being your parents when you are still becoming, but very much who you are.
If I say that I am proud of you, it somehow suggests that you are a reflection of my dreams. You are, but you are both so much more than that. I knew you were nice girls, good girls, but you have turned out in ways I would have never anticipated.
You guys are scary brilliant, ferocious and determined in both your intellectual life and matters of the heart. Yes, you are empathetic—I’m looking at you Meagan—and hilarious—put your hands in the air, Eronsky—but you are both deep thinkers, throbbing intellects that are always processing.
I can see each of you making significant contributions to not just our family or your respective communities, but the family of man. There is no limit on how far each of you will go. And I mean that. When you were growing up, I switched from wanting you to be mine to wanting you to be safe to wanting you to be comfortable to wanting you to be happy. Now, I want to watch you take over the world. Hyperbolic, to be sure, but every time I mix it up with you guys about significant matters, I come away smarter and questioning what I thought I already knew.
Erin: I have watched you in the middle of the city with a box of your office crap and alone in a room struggling to make beautiful important things. As someone who has seen a fair amount of talented young people up close, I can say that you are in the far reaches of that bunch. To call you a natural is to dismiss all the shit you ate to get where you are, but you instinctively understand the next right thing that brings you closer to the story you are trying to tell. You cannot teach that or inherit that or game that. That is you. That is who you have become. Your stories will be on the lips of not just your tribe, but many, many others.
Meagan: When you chose your path, I assigned it as a natural outgrowth of your journey. As it turns out, your intuition around humans—always a bit freaky to behold—is matched by an acute sense of intellectual inquiry. You are a scholar in all that entails and soon enough, a professional with a box of tools so big it will be hard to carry. Jesus, are you smart. You are always pulling back the blankets on what is in front of you, wanting to know why, wanting to know how, wanting to know more. In a family that doesn’t do brilliant, you are threatening to change the game. You exist in a rarified cohort, and yet you still manage to stick out. We will, in the end, have a hard time getting to the end of all the things you know about humans and their behaviors.
Who knows where the drive at your level comes from? Both Jill and I have done our bit, working to make sure that our work is meaningful and sometimes remarkable, but that doesn’t explain why each of you is working, striving, pushing to become something uncommon. There is, in both of you, an unwillingness to settle, a restlessness and frank ambition. Can you imagine how much joy that gives us as parents who have watched you grow up? Teeny, tiny little girls, afraid of toilets, or getting in trouble, or not having real friends, and now look at you. Life gives us things, amazing things, to stare at, but you are both the marvels of our life.
I find you both adorable, as I always have. We looked at the wedding album the other day and I was taken away by the trust and love you stared at us with. It made me happy that we have, in our bumpy ways, been worthy of that belief.
Please know that Jill and I are so glad that you have matured into remarkable young women with good values and standards that will serve you for the rest of your lives. But we are also aware that you have become creative forces and serious thinkers. We talk about you, marvel at you, speculate about your futures. We love being your parents, but we also like being your fellow travelers on this part of the road. Our amazement is less about the narrative of your conflicted birth, or complicated backstory, and more about what you have done as the ground turned solid beneath you. I look hard at the choices you have made since in terms of your health, your demons, and your challenges. You are tough young women who refuse to succumb when things are hard. You fight back.
We no longer pat your head, but wonder what else might be inside of them. I had no idea about this part, the part where you turn not only into adults, but big deals in your own right. We find it deeply exciting and can’t wait to see the splendors and achievements still to come.
There is struggle now and you know what? There will always be struggle. As soon as you figure out the job, or the case, or the story, there will be another. The reward for achievement is a hunger for more, a blessing that lives inside a curse.
So why struggle? Why not the easier, softer way? Part of it comes from fear. Maybe we aren’t all that. Maybe everyone who doubted us was right. But it goes beyond that.
We are workers, we are earners, we are strivers.
But still. We are not greedy people, we don’t care
for money except when we don’t have any and we don’t keep score by looking at or comparing ourselves with others.
Here’s what I would say about rising above, being more, pushing for excellence. It is the way that life was meant to be lived. The joy of accomplishment, of making or doing something we are proud of, is something that endures in the end. I care less and less that others think I am a big deal and care more and more about what I think. Is what I did worthy of what I have been given? Am I getting in the boat and rowing, along with others, to the far shore of excellence?
It is a mystery why that matters to me, why it matters to Jill, why it matters so much to you both. But it is our way, it is how we roll and it’s okay to own and revel in it.
But it is also deeply important that you come to rest on what you have accomplished and look behind you to see how far you have come. There is quiet, real happiness in that and it’s the only way we find the strength and hope for the next climb. We are with you on every step, rooting you on and shaking the pompoms when things go your way.
We are so profoundly proud of you both.
Happy birthday to you, Noodles, and to you, Beefaroni. Who would have guessed it would turn out this way?
Dad
2
Rain Check
In January 2015, I got an email from my stepmom, Jill. The subject line read “Helping dad tomorrow morning.” She told me that my dad was getting his pancreas “looked at” the next day around 7 A.M. at the hospital, and that she wanted me there as she had a pressing meeting at her office and couldn’t stay to be the point person. I said yes immediately but felt uncomfortable. My dad had battled health issues for twenty years. He didn’t like to involve his kids or cause them to worry unless it was absolutely necessary.
All That You Leave Behind Page 1
