Adderall Diaries [Hardcover]

Once one has mastered the rules, it becomes possible for a gifted few to transcend them. If you ask accomplished musicians, for example, they will tell you that it takes more than 10,000 hours of technical emersion before their musicianship can truly be considered art. In The Adderall Diaries, author Stephen Elliott shatters the strictures of conventional writing to create a poignant chronicle that remains with the reader long after he or she has finished the work. It is edgy, erratic, and often disheartening, yet absolutely riveting. As the author himself states, "to write about oneself honestly one has to admit a certain inconsistency and randomness that would never be tolerated in even the best of novels."

Events are not presented in chronological order, yet the narrative is understandable and relatively easy enough to navigate nevertheless. While not for everyone, particularly those with tender sensibilities, this book is a remarkable read. Those who peruse its pages will be rewarded by the creativity, insight, and pure art-form that comprise Elliot's writing. The subject matter is incredibly disturbing, yet like Adderall, a Schedule D amphetamine from whence the author's addiction lent the book its name, once you fall into the story it is extraordinarily challenging to break free.

In some ways a real-life version of John O'Brien's heartrending Leaving Las Vegas, Elliot's book was supposed to have been a true-crime drama, yet it morphed into an autobiography along the way. The backdrop is the nearly six month trial of Hans Reiser, a brilliant but curmudgeonly Linux programmer, who was accused of killing his estranged wife Nina. Despite hiring a respected attorney, Hans' narcissistic personality, peculiar behavior, and condescending manner undermine his case before the jury. The proceedings take a bizarre twist when Sean Sturgeon, Nina's former lover and Hans' closest friend, enters the picture. A BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism masochism) aficionado who traveled in the same twisted circles as Elliot before becoming a born-again Christian, Sean not only confessed to eight (7  really) unrelated murders but also, according to Hans, played a considerable role in Nina's disappearance as well. As the trial began, her body had not been found.

Regarding Sturgeon, the author relates, "I've heard of him digging a knife in his own arm, carving RAGE, or standing naked in the middle of a room while several women strike at him with leather straps, his blood pooling at his feet. But, that was before he became a Christian. Now he goes to church every week, volunteers at the soup kitchen on weekends... I'm sitting across from a man who may be a murderer, but I can't tell." In an extraordinary coincidence, Elliot's own father also confessed to a murder in his memoirs that he may or may not have committed. Unlike fiction, truth really does not always have to make sense.

The truth of Elliot's life is that it has been crammed with heartbreak and misfortune. Tortured by a father who beat and intimidated him, he watched his mother slowly die from multiple sclerosis as a youth, emptying her urine bucket as she lay atrophied upon the couch too weak to care, before running away after she passed on. Shuffling amongst group homes, he lost four close childhood friends to overdose or suicide in six years. Ultimately he found release in drugs and violent sex, working as a stripper, a drug dealer, a professor, and a writer, among other things. While these experiences are nearly as painful to read as they must have been to endure, he has learned to transcend his anguish to write about relationships, love, and loss with brilliant, memorable prose. One sentence alone makes for poignant example, "But I don't know about Mike yet, the taste of gun like a mouthful of coins, his wife, five months pregnant with a second child, stopping in front of the door with no idea what awaits her inside."

Stephen Elliot is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed novel Happy Baby. His writing has been featured in mainstream magazines such as Esquire and GQ, and newspapers like the New York Times, as well as unconventional publications such as The Best American Erotica and Best Sex Writing. A guy who intimately understands depression, addiction, and life's bitter challenges, he tackles thorny subjects in interesting, meaningful, and, ultimately, enlightening ways. His newest work, The Adderall Diaries, is an unforgettable read.

Lawrence Kane
Author of Blinded by the Night, among others

Note: originally reviewed in the Sep/Oct '09 issue of ForeWord Magazine

Publishers Weekly calls him "the most underrated writer in America". So I guess that makes me the most underrated dad, his Uncle Ron the most underrated uncle, and my dog Lucky the most underrated dog.

Steve Elliott grew up adopted in an upper middle class enclave of Chicago known as Indian Boundary. Where he played softball in the street with his nice-guy dad, soccer in back and in AYSO. He had guitar lessons, karate lessons, gym membership, was in plays at the Jewish Community Center, painted lead figures, collected coins, made Christmas decorations, kept gerbils, and talked of wanting to be an aeronautical engineer. His cats were Smokey and Benson.

At 14 he was caught abusing his dying and disabled mother, and was put in Read Mental Hospital by the State of Illinois for 3 months. Then for 2 months he was in a succession of group homes. Then his father let him live in a small Jewish Children's Bureau home near their house with 6 other teens. Where he stayed 3 years. Inheriting money from his grandfather, and with help from a rich uncle, he attended University of Illinois without having to work, and graduated with no debt. His father gave him free apartments, and he went to graduate school at Northwestern on $7,000 from his father and $7,000 from his uncle. After that his father paid off his gambling debts of about $4,000 and he headed west.

Since then he has published 12 books, all of which claim vaguely that he was abused as a child--without providing specifics-- and that he "grew up in group homes"--carefully ignoring his first 14 years. He portrays himself as a sadly oppressed street kid who became successful through his own pluck with no help from a difficult world. Needless to say, he and James Frey are good friends. Truth of the matter is, he's a garden-variety spoiled brat who has promoted an elaborate con job into a career as a sad figure.

Recently his father donated $3,000 to help him start Rumpus, a popular blog, where he pontificates for those with literary pretensions, and rants about what a mean guy his dad is.

In THE ADDERALL DIARIES, he talks about how his thuggish, larger-than-life father might have killed a man, linking this to a famous murder case that he was pursuing for a television documentary. Vanity Fair called it "genius" and the New Yorker calls him "the most influential man in America in his income bracket". They may be right.

It may be brutal to call him an idiot savant, but that doesn't make it untrue. He's also a compulsive liar and a drug-addled punk addicted to adderall and welbutrin. He once told me, "I don't know why I tell lies." I don't, either. He appears to be crazy now. Some kind of genetic freak.

I sat next to Stephen for much of the Hans Reiser trial so I can tell you that he's right on the money with this descriptions and behind the scenes commentary. I have not, of course, sat next to him on his life's adventure. It shocks me but I greatly admire Stephen's ability to stand back and put it all out there for everyone to see.

It takes a terrific writer to weave Stephen's story in with the trial but somehow he's done it...and it's a page turner. I was racing to see what happened next. Great book.

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