Customer Reviews

The Adderall Diaries

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 ½ 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.

I made the mistake of reading this book after seeing so many glowing reviews of its content. Maybe I'm just not the target audience, having never been a troubled youth or tried drugs of any kind, but I find this book to be pathetic. Not only was I disturbed by the disjointed ramblings of the author, I had to literally force myself to finish the book, in hopes that I missed something important and that the next page would finally bring the "a-ha!" moment in which I felt a connection with the author, or at least something beyond boredom with the content. I would rather read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" over and over for a year straight than recommend this book to anyone (and no, I didn't like that book one bit, either).

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.

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 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 ran away after his mother died, and was put in Read Mental Hospital by the State of Illinois for 3 months. Then for 6 months he was placed 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.

Recently his father donated $3,000 to help him start Rumpus, a popular blog.

In THE ADDERALL DIARIES, his most fascinating book to date, 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.

Unlike the other reviews here, I didn't think that The Adderal Diaries explored the issues to any real depth. If Elliot was truly despondent over the state of his romantic life, I didn't feel it. The S & M issue is a very adult topic that I thought Elliot dealt with on a PG13 level. It just didn't answer my question of, "Why do people DO this?" I also didn't understand how he was able to get the meds from a doctor? The writing seemed a bit shallow to me.

Hats off, though, to Graywolf Press; a local (Minneapolis) independent, non-profit publisher who is holding their own amongst the big house publishing companies.

It was a fun read, especially if you live in San Francisco and are familiar with Adderall. His Adderall habit is about as serious as that of a 17 year old high school girl, so he fails in making his drug abuse very compelling. His S&M stuff is also pretty boring. You'd have more fun reading Craigslist or going to the Power Exchange. But it's fun to read a book that references familiar SF landmarks, and despite the Adderall usage being quite tame, it's fun to read about that too.

The critical acclaim is bizarre, and must result from some kind of group think. It's not a great novel, but it's a fun read. I read it on vacation, and that was the right way to read it. An enjoyable little book.

And no, I'm not his mean and terrible father (read the book if you don't get the reference).

Stephen Elliott has created a work of art from some dissimilar sources as writer's block, an Adderall problem, the loss of friends back home, the pull of a murder trial where he's tangentially aligned with some of the players involved and, of course, his own issues with love and intimacy and his difficult relationship with his estranged father.

It sounds like a lot of plates to keep spinning and Elliott does it with seeming effortlessness (which is never effortless when you try to write such things). The pace never lags, and the compelling, beautifully written voice never lets you down.

His work has an admirable honesty, lovely, sharp, intelligent prose, and a great ability to bring the reader into the emotional landscape of the text.

I could go on, but the short version is that this is one of the best books I've read in a couple of years and I'd HIGHLY recommend that you read it too. 5 stars.

I just finished this book and feel like I've been submerged in another's life for the past week. The book blurber (Nick Flynn?) who said that Stephen Elliott's ADDERALL DIARIES starts like a big ocean and hones its force to a narrow channel had it just right. The murder trial of a highly narcissistic computer programmer named Hans Reisner gives Elliott the opportunity to dive into his own past - a complicated relationship with his own violent and narcissistic father, the loss of his mother at 13, a bleak life of early suicide attempts, drugs, and group homes, and his current addiction to both Adderall and S/M relationships. Elliott writes out of a lot of understanding for both himself and others - and without judgment - which is why the sections about his love relationships, and S/M in particular, ring true. (Elliott reminds me of Dorothy Allison in this regard).

I highly recommend this book...and for those of you who've read it, you can see Elliott's adventures with his father aren't over. Just consider the review of "Gladiator" below...