Erin Lee Carr on New Projects, Her Father’s Legacy and Grief

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We turn now from the clamor for power in Europe to one of the most talent American media reports of his generation. After David Carr collapsed in the newsroom of The New York Times in 2015, his daughter, Erin Lee Carr, combed through a lifetime of correspondents in search of comfort and support. What she found is documented in her memoir “All That You Leave Behind” which explores her father’s legacy and her own grief, her addiction, and her sobriety. She spoke about it all to our Alicia Menendez.

ALICIA MENENDEZ: The sudden death of your father, David Carr, is the catalyst for your new memoir “All That You Leave Behind.” There were hundreds of thousands of people who followed him on Twitter, who read his writing. What was it about him that made him so indispensible as a journalist?

ERIN LEE CARR, AUTHOR, “ALL THAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND”: I think that answer that I keep coming back to is really direct, really honest. He had this sort of like Don Quixote meets Deadwood. Like he was just this sort of amazing linguist with ideas, and you never could predict what he was going to say. Like if he were sitting here, it’d be a very different interview. I mean, he just had such a sort of unique, surprising quality.

MENENDEZ: Everyone I know who’s read this book has said, “well, I thought I was close to my parents, but now I’m starting to doubt that,” because the relationship you have is so unique, right? I mean, did you know that before you wrote the book?

CARR: I think I did. I think that when you have an origin story like we do, and that is he was addicted to drugs, he got sober. So we literally changed his life. And so, I think that there was a lot of closeness derived from that. Like he wanted to take care of us because he had abandoned us at a certain point. And so, I think that I was very appreciative of the closeness, but God damn it, how scary it was when he died. I mean, the hole was so big because he was my parent, he was my mentor, he was like my good friend, my confidant, and like – and then when he died, it was just like all of those roles were gone. And so, I was left to sort of figured it out. I mean, I guess I felt kind of resentful that he was all those things.

MENENDEZ: When you were little, your dad used to whisper to you and your twin sister, “everything good started with you,” and you write in the book, “I realize the converse truth that there must have been an everything bad before there was an everything good.” You’ve talked a little bit about the drugs, the alcohol, but paint a picture for me. What did you learn was his life that predated you?

CARR: You know, he was somebody that was not, “oh, I drank some wine after dinner and I may have, you know, forgotten about what to do the next day.” He was a blackout, intense drinker, alcoholic. He was somebody that got involved with my mom who was a, you know, a prolific drug dealer in Minneapolis, and they got together and they went from dry goods, you know, cocaine to crack. And that is not the typical story of how your parents meet. And I think that it just sort of really shocked people, but I think that one of the things that’s unusual about this is that he got sober.

I think when we were born, he was not sober, he was not able to do it yet, but he sort of saw as we were coming into the world and he had to deposit us at foster care to get sober, he said this is worth getting sober for. I’m not just messing up my life, I would be messing up theirs. And so pretty incredible that he was able to kick a habit like that.

MENENDEZ: There’s a harrowing story that your dad would tell that you tell in this book about you and your sister being very little being left in snowsuits in the car so that he could go get high. And I wonder for you how you look back at that story and comport that person, the dad who did that with the dad who raised you in all those days after.

CARR: I think that story is – teaches us that addiction explains everything and excuses nothing. That was not the first or the last time he would put our lives in danger. I think that when alcohol and drugs interacted with my father, he was not able to make parenting decisions. And so there was a lot of conflict of, you know, my dad helps me with most things, but he also has gotten drunk, you know, when I was in high school I didn’t – I didn’t know how to reconcile, to answer your question. It felt like there were two different people, but I guess that it made me understand addiction more, but then I would realize I didn’t really understand addiction.

MENENDEZ: How did the addiction that he grappled with begin to manifest in your own life for you?

CARR: From the very first time I took a sip of alcohol I wanted more, and that would always be the case with me and alcohol. If I had a glass, I wanted three. If I wanted three, then I had seven. And so in my 20s, as a young person, I felt myself completely at odds with my alcoholism. It didn’t look like my dad’s, I wasn’t suffering with crack addiction, I didn’t have to give up babies for adoption – or excuse me, for foster care. But it was beginning to make choices in my life. Could I go to the meeting in the morning, could I do all the work that I needed to for the next day while I was drinking? No I could not.

MENENDEZ: Yet even through some of that process, you reconcile it to yourself as like “I’m just a nice girl who, you know, maybe drinks a little too much white wine.” There was difficulty in identifying it as addiction because of the way that —

CARR: Well that’s the disease. I mean that’s like – that’s delusion. I mean no one needs to have 10 drinks. I think that I, you know, maybe sometimes I would have two and like that’s the night I was like “well I only had two drinks and I was able to do it.” And so I think that I wrote this book in an effort to demystify what alcoholism looks like.

MENENDEZ: There’s a passage I’d love for you to read, it’s 196.

CARR: “As the weeks pass, I couldn’t help but text him because we’ve been so digitally tethered, it felt only normal, albeit a bit morbid. One night, I wrote ‘I’m sorry I didn’t act more grateful when you gave me that sweater at Christmas.’ The message felt like the panicked act of a kid who had forgotten her Algebra assignment. I wanted him to know that I was appreciative and that I love that he had gotten me a sweater that reminded me of his own. I sometimes feel like an inferior version of his doppelganger, I have his DNA but am not him. Our text history is short, I deleted a majority of them to free up space on my phone and I curse myself for it, but I still have his e-mails. I typed in C-A-R-R-2-N at Gmail.com again and click through page after page of our back and forth. I created a Google document and started copying and pasting my favorite lines. I find myself thinking about you a lot, wondering what kind of adventures you’re living, learning you are doing, tasks you are on. I’d be working every angle. When I close my eyes I could hear him saying those things out loud. Whenever I would send him a flare e-mail, his response was always relentlessly positive and made me feel like I was part of a tribe, a team, that someone was taking care of me. I knew then and now that this was a rare relationship for a child to have with a parent.”

MENENDEZ: You’ve lived a very rarified existence, and I mean that in a number of ways. But one of the ways in which I mean that is that you’re a public person in your own right with your own accomplishments. You’re the child of someone who was a public person, and you crystallize that in the book in the day he dies. What was it like to share that moment with the world?

CARR: At the time, it doesn’t make sense. I think in all the days that came before it, I was go grateful to be my dad’s kid that he got to live his life full of creative direction. Like he loved what he did for a living, he was so proud of The New York Times. But the fact that his professional importance took precedent over our family dealing with the aftermath of his death, I mean it made me so mad. And I think that, you know, when famous people die, I get – I feel angry at our response. Like, you know, whether it be Anthony Bourdain, every single person putting on Instagram like “I loved him.” I’m like “his family loved him, can we just give them a second?” And I think that that night I was really – I was really angry at the Twitter chorus, but I think in the days that followed really understanding how he was loved, and it wasn’t just by our small little Minnesotan family, it was really by, you know, his friends, I think that it ultimately was very healing. But I guess that I’m just trying to speak that there was a lot of conflict involved.

MENENDEZ: No, of course there was, I mean how would you describe more generally the experience of being a person who shares a parent with so many people, especially for you when it’s the only parent you really have?

CARR: I think it was weird in the months after his death, because his friends would take me out to lunch and they would be like do you – do you have the David Carr – can I have – you know, like there was this confusion because I’m his kid, I’m his close sort of protege, so they wanted David Carr and I felt like this total fraud, like this person that hung out with him that, you know, that, you know, that loves him but such a worse version of him. And so it was really confusing trying to figure out what people wanted from me.

MENENDEZ: What does it take to go from feeling like someone’s disappointing doppelganger to becoming one’s own person? Are you there?

CARR: I’m there when I’m in your spot, I think when I’m doing my job I very clearly feel like my own person. I think when I’m talking about him and having these emotional conversations, I feel him. I wonder if I’m saying the right thing. I think that there – there enters some self doubt of which I don’t have a lot otherwise in my life because I’ve sort of dealt with it, so I think that, yes.

MENENDEZ: There was a core tension of the book which is here you are, a person who wants to succeed on merit, who has done a lot of hard work to make that so. And yet there is the reality that you are own known as someone else’s child which in your –

CARR: Someone’s child as a 31 year old, yes.

MENENDEZ: — which in your 30s, yes, is a very strange thing. And yet you write a book that centers yourself, right, like that’s the – that is the challenge which is how do you write a book that centers you as someone’s child, while then that not becoming the totality of who you are or how other people see you?

CARR: Yes, I mean I love that you talked about that I have a rarified existence, because this is not a book that looks the other way on that. I think that when people think about nepotism or connections or being somebody’s kid, I mean it is my job to fully embrace it and be transparent about it. When I talk to students, I talk about my origin story about in media, how that happened. But I also talk about the lessons he taught me as my mentor, bring a notebook, you know, come prepared, offer to pay for the check, don’t be an idiot. I think so I was – I am grateful to be his kid, but it’s almost like I need to say that. If I walk into a room and somebody introduces me as David Carr’s child, that’s not going to go well for them. I get to say that. I think that, you know, I don’t want to come across as brusque, but I think that we’re all searching for defining ourselves by who we were and who we are becoming. And I think that it really has been about me declaring that versus other people doing it.

MENENDEZ: There’s a part in the book that I love where you’re headed to an internship, a job, and he asks you if you’ve showered that morning and you say “no” and he says “Erin you are neither pretty enough or smart enough to not shower,” which stings even secondhand. And yet, it is in the pantheon of things you learn from him. I mean what else do you carry with you to this day that you think like, “David Carr, say what you mean, mean what you say.”

CARR: It’s really about trusting your gut. He taught me how to pick a story, what has the ability to go viral, how to talk to people, how to get them to trust you. I mean, it is so embedded within the DNA of what I do on a daily basis. And so — but what I love about what he says to me about these things is, “it is inherent that you know how to tell a good story. I didn’t teach you that, it’s by you thinking about this, and watching, and being a part of audience where you figured it out.” He — he didn’t want to take credit for that, but I think that I must have gotten it also from him.

MENENDEZ: In your documentary work, you are drawn to really complicated characters, largely women, lots of gray area in the subject matter that you explore a lot of your work in true crime. Do you think that there is something in your own background that makes you gravitate towards that type of person?

CARR: The complicated is where the interesting stories lie. And so like, I was raised understanding we are not equal to our best or worst action. And so, as a true crime filmmaker, I really wanted to think about what is an empathetic way to do this work and to do it well? And so, with Gypsy Rose Blanchard from “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” about the famous Munchausen by proxy case and a new two-part coming out about Michele Carter, the woman who texted her boyfriend to kill himself, and sadly he did.

MENENDEZ: Your most recent project, HBO’s “At the Heart of Gold” takes a look at the sexual abuse scandal that rocked USA Gymnastics. What was the hardest part of making that film?

CARR: It was a departure for me, but I was fascinated with it because, how did this happen? How on earth does something like this go on for 20 years? What does it say about our society, about female sexuality, that you can’t tell you parent something weird just happened in there? I knew that it wasn’t — it wasn’t specifically like my other work, but when I watched the victim impact statements in that court room in Michigan.

KYLE STEPHENS, SEXUAL ABUSE SURVIVOR: Larry Nassar’s actions had already caused me significant anguish, but I hurt worse as I watched my father realize what he had put me through. My father and I did our best to patch up our tattered relationship before we committed suicide in 2016.

CARR: And I had been working on it for six months prior to that. I just – – I had never seen something like that. It was so incredible and so brave and this was after I had written the book, so I had like kind of a new amount of emotional awareness as it relates to people processing.

MENENDEZ: I couldn’t help, as I was reading this, but wonder, would David Carr like this book?

CARR: I think, if I’m answering very honestly, I think the depiction of his family after his death would be deeply hard for him to read. I think that grief has a way of either pulling a family apart at the seams or bringing them together and we — we did not know how to do it after he died. And so holidays became this incredibly maudlin affair. And so, you know — I think that would have been really painful for him. He loves his wife Jill, I write about her as my stepmom. I think he would probably have edits on that, I know my sisters did. She’s an incredible person and she was dealing with the very sudden death of her partner. So, while this book may have intense moments with her, I like — I understand. She just — she couldn’t take care of us because she was taking care of herself. In terms of things he would love, he would love the picture of us at Southby, like us dancing. I mean, I don’t think it’s very usual to like be in a dance party with your dad at Southby, and like there we are having like the most fun. He loves a good redemption story line. I think it was very unclear if I was going to be successful. And he always said, like, I know it’s going to be, but like I think he was fibbing a little bit. I think he was providing confidence in me when I didn’t have it in myself. And so, I think like my dad, he’s an underdog and I’m an underdog and I think he loves that part.

MENENDEZ: Erin, thank you so much.

CARR: Thank you.