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

This is an unconventional and amazing book. What started out as a quest by the author to investigate a possible homicide turns into a memoir in which the author subjects himself and his past to a blistering examination. The writing is laced with intense events and realizations, and it's quite an experience, but not for the timid of heart. This is very brave work, and I recommend it highly.

Half-memoir, half-true crime story, The Adderall Diaries is a spare yet vivid rendering of lives lived on the margins, of floating among temporary jobs and temporary partners, of a world where blatant dishonesty, cruelty, and self-interest are as common as, and sometimes serve in place of, love. The germ of the book is the author's distant connection to a man who claims to have murdered eight people and gotten away with it, a man himself romantically linked to the evident victim of another murder, for which the missing woman's husband is on trial. But readers looking for investigative details and legal nuance will be disappointed. Elliott wraps occasional reports on the case around accounts of his own current life (drug use, fleeting or unsatisfactory romantic relationships, violent sex) and fragments of autobiography (more drug use, drifting around the country holding various jobs, a difficult relationship with his father that left him a ward of the state as a teenager).

Writing a confessional memoir of this type is a tricky task: it's too easy to become lurid, or to slip into a strange sort of bragging: "look how decadent I am." Elliott avoids both by offering only limited elaboration: he describes where he goes and what he does without delving into explicit detail or intrusive self-justification. This sparseness leaves the prose slightly disjointed, in a way that generally works well to capture the hollowness of Elliott's existence, though it occasionally becomes awkward or jarring. In one or two places it's too obvious that he's reaching for effect by juxtaposition, which undermines the impression of artlessness the language otherwise creates.

The absence of "explanation" allows the description of Elliott's troubled childhood, and those of his friends, to clarify yet never fully justify how he became the man he is today. Even when he tries to explain how he and he his father have failed each other, he acknowledges the limitations of his own perspective and memory, tries to tell the truth while admitting the impossibility of doing so. Many readers will find the sordid lives and early deaths described in The Adderall Diaries disturbing, not worth reading about, but for those who value psychological insight into all walks of life, it makes for a quick, compelling read. As Elliott writes:

"[Sylvia] Plath's last collection culminated in a new era in letters, the merger of the artist with her art. It was the beginning of the sixties, the Boomers were stepping from beneath Eisenhower's prosperous shadow. Fifteen years after Plath's death, Susan Sontag wrote of Goethe and his disdain for Kleist, who submitted his work, 'on the bended knees of his heart.' Sontag cast a harsh light across her generation's artistic expectations. 'The morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist's plays' tales were mined-- is just what we value today.' That was thirty years ago. Today's artists are healthier and no special prizes are given for suffering. It's no wonder [Elizabeth] Wurtzel went to law school. The books of our time have little to do with the destruction of the self. We expect our bards to survive, to figure things out. The literature of triumph over adversity spans every age, but where is the rest of it? We're living in the most medicated era humanity has ever known. The artist is no longer expected to play chicken with her creation. Doctors monitor our intake. We live in the age of Goethe on Zoloft."

For those who remain fascinated by the destruction of the self, this is indispensable reading.

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