All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(32)
I hope we can see this moment and move on in a constructive way. I don’t want to restart the argument I just wanted to let you know how I feel.
To: Erin Lee Carr
From: David Carr
Date: 10/11/2013
Subject: Re: A couple of thoughts
honey,
selfish and giving, loving, funny as hell, smart and crazy making, you are my daughter, I adore you, am so so proud of you. and i love you. we want you to have good things, soft landing and all of it, but you made it hard this time around.
relax, kick back, enjoy yourself, and know that you are loved and looked after. I am off to paris with deadlines crawling all over me, but i very much like your New York Observer memo. beautifully done.
we will maneuver through all of this, together, in our imperfect ways. sorry for your bumpy ride up, but enjoy the air and the lack of nyc. we will talk more. (and the reason that you got both barrels is that you took the time to condescend to me in the middle of an argument. I take that from no one, including you, so don’t take it personally.)
this is a bump in a great and growing relationship, one that I count as treasure and lean on. I need you in my corner just as bad as you need me.
i love you madly and truly.
david
That was the thing with my dad. In order for our relationship to work, I had to learn to not take his darker moments personally. Sometimes, though—very rarely—I would push back and carefully explain to him that his expectations were out of sync with reality. He just expected too much out of me.
Nothing made this more obvious than a trip we took as a family a few months later. My dad was always one for big gestures, and he decided that he wanted to treat himself and his tribe to a weeklong stay in a remote village in Costa Rica. He told us to dream of coconuts, salt water, and friendly monkeys. Our family did not always travel well together. We all took turns being at odds with one another, apart from Meagan, who pretty much got along with everyone.
We arrived at Montezuma. Meagan, Madeline, and I would stay in the casita, located down the hill from the main house Dad and Jill were staying in. Day after day, Dad gave us our marching orders and we’d often pile into a car that was meant to have four but was now carrying six passengers—my grandma was along for the ride, thankfully. One day I was nursing a particularly bad sunburn and thoughtlessly opened my mouth to complain for the eight hundredth time.
“It’s so fricking hot in the casita.”
“Erin,” my dad started. He paused and stared at me through the rearview mirror.
“Looking at you is like looking into a dirty mirror,” he spat out the car window. No one said anything. I had no idea what to say or where it came from.
Meagan broke the silence. “Dad, it is not okay to say that.”
He grunted and got out of the car, and just like that I was left there, my mind repeating that sentence over and over. It felt like I had been slapped.
I raced down to the smaller cabin and sat on the bed, still reeling. I hated that his words had gotten to me, but even more so I hated that I could see truth in what he said. My mimicking behavior had led me to pick up his deficits as a human, and I was unable to see clearly enough to attempt to fix them. I would have to become my own person, but at what cost?
I mentioned to my dad that I had been invited to TEDx to speak about my documentary work. It was a local Brooklyn event with around thirty people in attendance, but it would be filmed. Due to a fairly memorable disaster with my high school debate team, I had a slight public speaking phobia. I sent a flare to my dad, and he came back with this manifesto:
I have some thoughts about ways for you to go. so thrilled by this. comes at a perfect time in your professional development. you won’t be perfect, but you will be perfectly amazing.
some things for you to think about….
storytelling still attains…and that means characters and import, but also editing and writing.
viral is as viral does. it can’t be gamed, but it can be sought.
you are standing there as a kid in brooklyn who has trouble figuring out how to put together a bed from ikea, but figuring things out as you go is a plenty good way to go when the media business is reconfiguring itself.
the loss of legacy business model has been brutal for people who worked in it, but the absence of friction is profound. dad’s first big story at 24 was seen by 30K, erin’s 10M. see attached slide there are many platforms and many are important. there is where you work, there is reddit, there is twitter, there is YouTube. they all infect each other.
you are more influential than you think. by citing the great work of others in your social media feed, when it comes time to pimp your own stuff, you have credibility sharing credit and sharing duties matters. great work comes from the spaces in between people. sitting alone in your room talking to a web cam or hitting the streets by yourself rarely yields excellence.
ppls want to see ppls talking to ppls. social medium desires social media. one where people are interacting.
not all the values of television are worthless. 70 year legacy has yielded some best practices.
sound matters, desperately especially on small platforms. people see stories with their ears.
short form requires guidance. you can’t get people through a lot of stuff in a short amount of time without installing some signage.
we are in a great epoch of documentary film. many of the most important stories, the one that shake the world, often come from documentaries. cite examples.