New York Times columnist and former crackhead David Carr, who does not like this website, is laying down his book, filled with drug-induced anecdotes, on the American public with an excerpt in Sunday's Times. Smartly, the paper has released the giant blockquote ahead of time, so the baby booming set can remember just what it was like to put a glass bowl to their lips.

Because Mad Men has been in the news lately — a string of glowing reviews, Emmy nods — Carr sort of reminds us the show's lead character, Jon Hamm's Don Draper. In their present, both lead lives with sought-after big city jobs, wielding plenty of power, and go home to a family who loves them, all the while maintaining a past filled with sordid details, but not so terrible that they didn't make both Draper and Carr a better man today. The difference? While Draper stole the identify of a fallen comrade in war to get himself out of combat, he hasn't owned up to it; Carr, who spent his formative years on drug binges, is acknowledging his past. To sell books, of course.

Here's what you should know:

• Carr would get high while his twins were asleep in the house. He would beat his girlfriend, who happened to be the mother of his kids and two others; she also was his dealer.

• He managed to escape contracting the diseases many drug users of his type do, like HIV and Hep C. Instead, he got a wife and kids. But he did get crabs.

• The man's memory is shot. Don't count on it to be accurate, reliable, or filled with every memory of his past. So some of this stuff may well be made up, invented, fictionalized, but that doesn't mean we get to call his book a work of fiction. Just ask David Sedaris. But he did try to get his story straight:

As a veteran journalist, I decided to report the story. For two years on and off, I pulled medical and legal documents and engaged in a series of interviews with people I used to run with. By turns, it became a kind of journalistic ghost dancing, trying to conjure spirits past, including mine.

Some people I interviewed wanted me to say I was sorry — I am, and I did. Some people wanted me to say that I remembered — I did, and I did not. And some people wanted me to say it was all a mistake — it was, and it was not. It felt less like journalism than archeology, a job that required shovels and axes, hacking my way into dark, little-used passages and feeling my way around. It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.