THE ADDERALL DIARIES: How Stephen Elliott’s new memoir is too sensational to be fiction

Stephen Elliott, The Adderall Diaries, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2009, $23.00

Even three years after James Frey admitted to fabricating the more conspicuous anecdotes in A Million Little Pieces, the shock-and-awe memoir seems as safe an investment as newspaper stock. Most recently Berkley Books was forced to nullify its contract with Herman Rosenblat whose Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence turned out to be a novel. But despite the danger, this September, Graywolf Press will release Stephen Elliott’s sensational new memoir—The Adderall Diaries. The Minneapolis publisher has taken precautions to prove the book’s authenticity, going so far as to include documentary photographs and footnotes. One picture of Mr. Elliott’s lacerated back (he discusses at length the pleasure he takes in being cut during sex) may come as a shock to the skeptical reader who misconstrues the more iniquitous passages in this book as apocryphal.

The Adderall Diaries, which juggles at least three main storylines—and arguably as many as seven—feels at times overfull. But the density, in the end, is perhaps only mimetic of a difficult life well documented. The core of the narrative concerns the trial of Hans Reiser, a California-born computer programmer who, in September of 2006, apparently killed his wife, Nina. Joshua Davis, who profiled Reiser for Wired Magazine, calls Elliott one morning looking for Sean Sturgeon, one of Reiser’s closest friends. Elliott and Sturgeon had “several girlfriends in common and [Elliott] once did a bondage photo shoot in [Sturgeon’s] apartment when he wasn’t home.” Sturgeon, confusingly, has confessed to killing eight, “or maybe nine,” people—though not Nina—and of his victims, he can’t point to a single body. Elliott’s connection to Reiser and Sturgeon is peripheral at best. But he is drawn to the case, in no small part, because his own father, Neil, claims to have killed a man in Chicago in 1970 after being assaulted in a park near his house. No police reports exist to substantiate Neil’s claim, and the assault records from the 70’s have been expunged. Accordingly, both the crime Neil claims to have committed and the one he claims was committed against him exist only in the ether of the Elliott family mythology. If this sounds like a confusing foundation for a memoir, you won’t be surprised that reading it requires a lot of thumbing back through pages. Uncertainty is the underpinning tone of the work. When the first chapter begins, eleven people are apparently dead, and there isn’t a single corpse.

Yet with all the investigations that populate the story, this isn’t a true crime book in the journalistic sense. It is much less an exposé than it is Elliott’s In Cold Blood. Elliott has no direct contact with Reiser, but there are two Perry Smiths in The Adderall Diaries: Sean Sturgeon, and Neil Elliot. And yet it is less the “murderers,” and more Stephen Elliott’s life that one finds on trial here. When Stephen was eight, his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During her five-year deterioration, his father was out sleeping with other women. She died when Stephen was thirteen, but even before that he was abusing drugs and sleeping periodically on the streets. By the time she actually passed, Stephen was effectively homeless. Accordingly, personal history diminishes both Elliot’s powers of objectivity and empathy. And yet this doesn’t detract from one’s ability to empathize with Elliott himself.

There are so many traumas in the book that they’re difficult to digest if read through too quickly. Elliott’s life as depicted here is one of so few successes that you find yourself accepting without reservation some of his more dangerously irrational decisions—starring in, for instance, a bondage porn film in Culver City where a madam penetrates him with a strap-on while her boyfriend films. Elliott copes with his own tragedies while investigating those of others, and suffering accumulates in this book as neologisms do in Finnegan’s Wake. But perhaps ironically, it is because this is non-fiction that the proceedings are tolerable. As a novel it might seem indulgent, or too unapologetic. As a memoir, though, it is harrowing to read, which suggests that Elliott was brave to write it. The Adderall Diaries never shies from the available truth, and those facts that remain inaccessible are pursued exhaustively. Yet as cathartic as the narrative is, one has to wonder if Elliot is capable of purging his ghosts. There may simply be too many.

By Kaelan Smith