MINNEAPOLIS—When reporter David Carr began thinking about writing his life story, he found he couldn’t trust his own memory.

Was it his best friend who pulled the gun on Carr some 20 years ago when Carr—fired from a job and thrown out of a bar—tried to kick in his friend’s front door and broke a window, as Carr remembered it, or was it Carr himself who held the gun?

Armed with a video camera and digital recorder, Carr revisited his old haunts and interviewed ex-girlfriends, former employers and people he did drugs with. The result is “The Night of the Gun,” a memoir that traces Carr’s rise from cocaine addict to single dad raising twin girls to sobered-up media columnist for The New York Times.

“I’d always said I’d never write a book like this. And then I started to think, ‘But if I ever did, it would be really good,”’ Carr says.

Critics agree, heaping praise upon “The Night of the Gun” (subtitled “A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own”). The New York Observer said Carr’s first book “turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s.” Simon & Schuster is giving “The Night of the Gun” a big promotional push, with an accompanying Web site—www.nightofthegun.com—and about 75,000 initial copies of the book, published Aug. 5.

But the raves are not universal. After reading an excerpt featured as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Forbes.com media columnist James Brady said he doesn’t plan to read Carr’s book, calling it “an exercise in self-indulgent narcissism. What a waste—of talent, energy and professional competence.”

Carr, 51, said a “college tuition moment” prompted him to write his book. The twin girls Erin and Meagan that he had with a former girlfriend and cocaine dealer—identified as Anna in the book—are now 20 and attending universities in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Carr says he wrote up a book proposal “on a dare to myself” in two days. After an agent sold the idea, Carr—who lives in suburban Montclair, N.J.—traveled back to Minnesota to start the interviews. He ended up interviewing about 60 people and working on the book for three years.

Anna, who now lives in Arizona, agreed to be interviewed, but Carr says his first wife, Kim, did not. (Carr has since remarried and has an 11-year-old daughter named Madeline with his second wife, Jill.)

After battling Anna for the twins’ custody—and winning—Carr said “it wasn’t unpleasant” to talk to her again after all these years.

“I like her and she likes me, but it’s just weird. Really weird,” Carr said in his raspy voice. “’How about that scab you have on you from, you know, 20 years ago. Do you mind ripping that off and talking to me about it?”’

In the book, Carr doesn’t flinch from describing his arrests (including one he didn’t remember, for punching a cabbie), his trips to rehab (which turned out to be five instead of the four he remembered) and his bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. (Carr says his health is fine, although he’s been smoking a lot because of the book—the interview is interrupted several times by his hacking cough.)

After Carr’s twins are born—2 1/2 months premature and weighing just over 2 1/2 pounds each—he recounts an episode of leaving them trussed up in their snowsuits outside in a car as he visited a crack house in Minneapolis. Carr says such incidents convinced him that he had bottomed out and had to clean up. He entered a six-month inpatient treatment program after that.

“I hated being a bad father. I couldn’t stand that, and there’s nothing in my upbringing to allow for that,” Carr said.

Brian Lambert, a senior editor at Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, worked with Carr at the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, a weekly alternative newspaper where Carr eventually became editor. Lambert gives Carr kudos for his “verve and vernacular” and says the book “seems to be brutally honest.”

“It’s pretty remarkable,” Lambert says of Carr’s rise. “I’ve told people I expected him to be dead in the 1988-89 era.”