The Night of the Gun is the memoir of David Carr, the late and celebrated New York Times Journalist. But it's more investigative journalism than memoir, and it kind of gives you hope that no matter how much you generally suck at life, you can still reinvent yourself.

Allow me to borrow from Bruce Handy's review:

Before David Carr was the widely read media columnist for The New York Times’s Monday business section, he was a cokehead and an alcoholic. He’s now written a memoir about how he got from there to here, only he didn’t just write it — he also reported it, as best he could. To take one example: What really happened that night after a wedding when Carr yanked his buddy Ralph headfirst out of a town car and tossed him into a flower bed, and the subsequent hotel room brawl had to be broken up by security? “I don’t know,” Ralph verbally shrugs when Carr puts the question to him two decades later. “You’re asking one guy who is drunk and stoned if his memory matches the other guy’s who’s drunk and stoned.” In that conundrum lie both the genius and a primary flaw of this brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.

from The Night of the Gun:

A person who hated to miss anything, I had found something where finding that last little thing was considered an asset. I was not a maniac; I was a journalist, a head case with a portfolio. That manic, grubby tyrant inside me had found expression in an activity that would bring me recognition, a measure or recompense, and a reason to do something besides trip from high to high. —David Carr