“…I became curious about things and my curiosity kept me going.”
The Adderall Diaries, S.E.
Note: Adderall is a brand-name medication intended for people with ADHD. It increases alertness, libido and concentration, and, because it affects the mesolimbic reward pathway in the brain, it is as addictive as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Stephen Elliott’s memoir is a cocktail of sadomasochistic sex, hardcore drugs, emotional abuse and the altering perceptions on self, culture and the fine line that disguises the outcome of truth and fiction. But it’s more complex than a list of what it is and what it isn’t. As he mentions in the middle of the book: This book begins with a suicidal urge. If I was going to kill myself anyway, I could write whatever I wanted. And that’s what I started to do. He begins by mentioning that his father may have killed a man—a fantastic beginning. We follow the unraveling story, but then detour towards a murder trial set in San Francisco where Hans Reiser is accused of killing his wife, which Elliott has committed to write about. Through this suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat prose that pulls the reader along, underneath lies the tender and raw exploration of self that truly makes this work worthy of literary attention.
In a world where he finds comfort hogtied and abused, Elliott is an honest and straight-forward narrator. He is as sharp as a paper cutter in his approach to contemporary culture, like in moments when he amalgamates Paris Hilton’s incarceration with the Iraq War, showing the irony of how the media’s attention glamorized the beauty of a caged celebrity while war continued. He takes us through the detailed account of the murder trial throughout the book, and as he does so overlaps it with his tumultuous relationship with his father. By the end of the novel he confesses that it’s the most important relationship he’s ever had, even though his memory of it is terrifying: It wasn’t the handcuffs or the beatings or his shaving my head. That was nothing. It was the terror.
A denouement never arrives, only in regard to the trail in which Hans, the accused, finally confesses to the murder and is sent to a minimum of fifteen years in prison. In the last chapter Elliott refers to having read Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance numerous times as a teenager, hooked by Persig’s sense of resolution, trying to make it feel true to him. But he felt it was too much, too sweeping. The last line of the book can’t possibly be true, he felt. Instead: Neat conclusions do nothing for me. I write to make sense, to communicate, to connect, which is the overall sense you feel when reading this work.
The Adderall Diaries is an excellent, deft and provocative meta-memoir that becomes a strange, beautiful thing by the time you reach its last page.
Editor’s Note: Look for 12th Street Online’s interview with Stephan Elliott, coming soon.