Elliott Stephen - The Adderall diaries : a memoir of moods, masochism, and murder

Acclaim for The Adderall Diaries

If youre the type of reader who always wants to know what to expect, Stephen Elliott isnt your guy. But if you can take your literary sharp turns without hitting the brakesor knowing exactly where youll end upyou wont find a more provocative, masterful, thrilling ride than this.

Meredith Maran, The San Francisco Chronicle

The books most affecting passages are unlike anything being written today. They manage to fuse the radical subjectivity of the individual struggling to understand himself with a tender bafflement at the psychological evasions of modern life in America.

Steve Almond, The Boston Globe

Stephen Elliotts superb, sprawling meta-memoir might be just what the genre needs . [It] is at once skittish and deeply focused: In a single rotund paragraph, Elliott can ping-pong between webcam sex, financial anxiety, hypothetical affairs with college students and murder confessions.

Scott Indrisek, Time Out New York

The Adderall Diaries is neither a Kerouac-like brag, nor an Oprah-ready record of suffering and recovery. Rather, it is its own weird hybrid, a painfully honest and meticulously crafted memoir wrapped around a true-crime story that gets to the very essence of its time and place.

Scott Timberg, The Los Angeles Times

A book that begins as a true-crime tale of a murder trial and becomes a searing, self-conscious memoir of drug addiction, obsession and art as a means of survival . Powerful and unusual.

Craig Morgan Teicher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Ambitious and emotional and brilliantly orchestrated, an embroidery of memoir and true-crime reportage thats so stunning that I cant imagine Elliott writing about the above-mentioned murder case without also confronting his past (or vice versa) . Each strand is insightful and lucid; woven together, they form a thriving work of art.

Michael Miller, Fanzine

The intensity of Elliotts often beautiful prose evokes the effects of Adderall, the attention deficit medication. Yet the book shows a concern for order... [B]eneath these devices throbs an all-pervasive sense of the elusiveness of truth. Memories deceive, and almost everyone in this bookincluding the authoris a fantasist.

Juliet Wittman, The Washington Post

Though it sidesteps traditional memoir elements of revelation, redemption, and closure, it affords both reader and author something much more valuable: a transcendent inquiry into the nature of the self.

Sean Nelson, The Seattle Stranger

The Adderall Diaries, a brutally open-eyed memoir about growing up surrounded by violence, clad in the scattered threads of Capote-style crime reporting, is a strange beautiful thing.

Chris Michel, The Brooklyn Rail

A daring and riveting memoir of acute observation and astringent honesty . Inspired by the blood-dark lyricism of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, Elliott not only pieces together chilling (his urge to be hurt and humiliated) and mordantly funny (his dot-com interlude) stories from his rough, boldly improvised life, he also ponders the enigmas of Sylvia Plath and Paris Hilton and shrewdly reports on the murder trial of a mad-genius computer programmer . Elliott is a poet of pain.

Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

An endlessly fascinating memoir by a profoundly courageous writer . Despite the luridness of the subject matter, the author creates a refined, beautiful work of art . Deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics of uninhibited American introspection as On the Road and A Fans Notes.

Kirkus (starred review)

You dont just read The Adderall Diaries; you fall right into them. You read as if you are a few words behind the writer, trying to catch up, to find out what happens, to yell at him that hes doing a great job. And he is. Its a brilliant book.

Roddy Doyle

Stephen Elliott is one of those people who keep searching when everything is darkI dont know a more hauntingly fearless writer, and this is an immediate, visceral, and ultimately beautiful book.

Nick Flynn

I felt like a voyeur reading Stephen Elliotts memoirwhat is shocking and unbearable to most of us is commonplace to him . Reading The Adderall Diaries is like taking a step toward the edge of a cliff so you can peer down and imagine what it might be like to slip and fall. Normally we shudder and step back. Stephen Elliott jumps, and his harrowing, riveting memoir convinces you to follow him vicariously.

Amy Tan

The Adderall Diaries is a startling and original concoction, an irresistible melding of reportage and memoir and reconstruction. This is Stephen Elliotts best book, perfectly suited to his gifts as a seeker, as a storyteller, as a poet of wounds, unwelcome and otherwise.

Sam Lipsyte

Phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweakers eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have inventedthey absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

Jerry Stahl

THE ADDERALL DIARIES

ALSO BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

Novels

Happy Baby

What It Means to Love You

A Life Without Consequences

Jones Inn

Erotica

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up

Nonfiction

Looking Forward to It

As Editor

Where to Invade Next

Sex for America

Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction

Politically Inspired: Fiction for Our Time

This is my best novel. You should read this one first.

This is my first book and I dont recommend it. I was twenty-one when I wrote most of it and the publisher, a good friend operating on a small budget, misspelled my name on every other page.

This is a diary of the 2004 presidential campaign. Due to deadlines, the footnotes are in the back, as endnotes, and the narrative ends at the Democratic Convention, instead of the election, which some readers find unsatisfying. Its my only funny book.

THE ADDERALL DIARIES

A Memoir

Stephen Elliott

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2009 by Stephen Elliott

Photo/Illustration Credits
Chapter 1: View from Window, by Justin St. Germain. Chapter 3: Vietnamese Girl Fleeing in Terror after a Napalm Attack, by Nick Ut. Still from Hans and Ninas Wedding Video. Chapter 7: Paul Hora in Court, by Vicki Behringer. Beverly Palmer, by Norman Quebedeau. Chapter 9: Ramone Reiser, by Norman Quebedeau. Prosecution Puzzles, by District Attorney Paul Hora. Still from Hans and Ninas Wedding Video. All other photos by the author or Anonymous.

This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.