As I noted in my review of Happy Baby, I read this book and that one in an overlapping fashion. Happy Baby is a fictional account of some of the same memories that Elliott presents here as memoir (I'm not doubting them but I don't really know how to phrase that). Which made it kind of like I had two Stephen Elliotts telling me the same story in different ways, simultaneously. The Adderall Diaries is a different treatment of true crime, or at least most true crime I've read, in that it doesn't pr...

** 1/2 I've been known to say that I'm not wild about memoir, and when I say that, this book is what I mean. The saving grace here was the interweaving of Hans Reiser's murder trial--the most interesting parts of the book. Elliott *is* a good writer and a good storyteller but I'm not shocked (and I *think* that's the goal...?) by his stories of parental abuse, drug use, and masochism. Nor are those stories particularly unique. (I don't mean to dismiss Elliott's pain and struggles--I just don't k...

Okay, first of all, Nine did a really good job with this book: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...The stupid story about me and this book is that, y'know the thing where folks were passing around advance copies of it? Stephen Elliott sent advance copies to folks, who got to keep it for a week, then would forward it on to someone else. What a great idea, right? Except I had had it for three days when I lost my copy. I think it probably fell out of my girlfriend's car somewhere up near Rockri...

Is it weird to declare a memoir too self-absorbed?For a book that promises S&M, murder, and drug addiction, this was one of the flattest pieces of writing I've read in a long time. Elliot is neither particularly likable or loathsome. He's just there, rambling in this disorganized style with seemingly little effort built into developing a compelling narrative. I put it down after I skimmed the entire third chapter for something of interest and came up short.

The Adderall Diaries is a mix of memoir and true crime. The author Stephen Elliott has a troubled history of drugs and abuse. Hans Reiser is accused of murdering his wife Nina who had left him for Sean Sturgeon. Elliott peripherally knows Sturgeon through the San Francisco BDSM underground. There is no body, but all sorts of evidence points to murder by Hans. Sturgeon confesses to murdering 8 people whom he refuses to name, though Nina is not one of them. This complicated mess linking the emerge...

Stephen Elliot is definitely Stephen Elliott's favorite subject, but that's ok, b/c he's really interesting. There's a lot I found fascinating about him: His constant seeking of SM relationships, yet not considering himself a "lifestyle player." His recollections of favorite scenes featuring play piercing, heavy floggings and canings, and his non-identification as a "heavy player." His background, similar to my own, which must have endeared him to me, and made me devour this book, somehow fitti

This is an amazing accomplishment by Steve Elliott: to weave together examinations of himself and his history, to use the framework of the Hans Reiser trial as "permission" to analyze his writer's block, his Adderall habit, and his relationship with his father. And somehow while juggling all these narrative threads, he leads the reader on a cohesive journey.

It occurred to me as I read this book that I had read something very similar a few months ago, a memoir called Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. Granted, there are obvious differences. Elliott is a masochistic drug addict in San Francisco while Williams is a Mormon naturalist in Utah. Yet they both managed to write very similar stories, ones in which they used these high-profile events outside of themselves to help them make sense of their relationships with their parents, their families and the...

(This review - or whatever it should be called - was originally written for The Skinny magazine in Scotland)Stephen Elliott is hooked on Adderall. It’s basically speed in a capsule, prescribed by his psychiatrist. He takes too much; sometimes he opens up the capsules and snorts the powder. Sometimes he feels suicidal. He lives in San Francisco and has a string of often undefined, blurry relationships with women. Sometimes they tie him up, beat him, cut him.He thinks back to his youth as a runawa...

There are at least three distinctive parts to this exciting and fascinating book: "The Adderall Diaries" authored by Steven Elliot. This is part memoir, a true-crime expose, and literary and medical criticism/essay. The Adderall Diaries will also be featured soon as a major commercial film presentation.Steven Elliot was from Chicago, where his Cambodian father settled after immigrating, his mother died a premature death from MS (multiple sclerosis), leaving his father a young widower. He soon re...

I read this book very fast because the first 100 pages really held my interest. However, I lost momentum in the second half. A problem for me is the way Stephen Elliott paints himself as an adderall addict; yet, he uses such tiny amounts. At his heaviest Elliott describes taking 25 mg. a day. My boyfriend has been taking 30 mg. of extended release adderall every morning for the past six years. My boyfriend leads an extremely conventional life; he is no strung out writer getting tied up and whipp...

The most boring, self-indulgent piece of crap I've read in a while. Why do brilliant people I know love this author? Perhaps I should look into his earlier work?

this book is quite a feat of love and a feat of pain and a feat of endurance. elliott starts off with a bad case of writer's block. then something comes up, a dude who just confessed to having killed more than eight people (eight and a half) and another dude, dude #1's friend, who's been arrested for having killed his ex-wife. elliott thinks these two stories are his ticket out of writer's block. elliott is also putting into himself ever more generous quantities of adderall, a synthetic amphetam...

By page 40 I was annoyed by the number of typos; OK, so that's a minor issue. Or is it? Maybe it's a sign of the complete lack of care that went into this book. I don't know -- there's so much hype about this guy, and at the halfway point in this book, I'm not finding him to be all that fantastic of a writer/thinker/story teller. He's just a weirdo who's had some lucky breaks (and some not-so-lucky breaks). I mean, just becuase you tell us that you like having your nipples pinched until they ble...

after: Okay, here's another quicky book review. This is a weird, rambly, disjointed book. Right before I started it, I signed up for the Rumpus email list, and if you've never read it, it's a daily dose of Stephen Elliott's weird, rambly, disjointed musings. So I pretty much knew what I was getting into with this. It wasn't bad or anything, and Elliott is a pretty interesting, pretty fucked up guy, whose head is an interesting place to muddle around in for a little while. The book is kind of a h...

I don’t intend to demean the power of the addiction or sexual discovery narrative, and I don’t want to demean those who may have found something relevant in Elliott’s narrative. And I fully admit that I may have missed something because I have not read any of Elliott’s other works. I wonder if I would have cared more if I had read his other books. But the fact remains that I did not care much about this book. The narrative was flat and uninvolved. The addiction barely registered as being damagin...

After seeing the movie a few times I picked up a copy of this memoir at the library. Both were strikingly different, yet enjoyable in unique ways. There's a raw honesty to Elliott's writing that's refreshing.

3.5, rounded down.Although this is a quick moving and sometimes involving narrative, perhaps due to the influence of the titular substance on the author, it is not quite a rousing success. It seems like two ideas for a book somewhat awkwardly conflated into one Frankenstein-like creature: a quasi-memoir depicting the author's harrowing childhood with an abusive father and his descent into addiction and the S & M 'lifestyle' - and then a more straightforward account of the murder trial of Hans Re...

Okay... this book was just all over the place and weird and unrelatable and I just didn't know what to believe or care about. It's a "true crime memoir" but what in good god is actually true about it? It is a "memoir" so it's mostly that author just talking about his life, his desires, his fears, his day-to-day activities, his many relationships, and his jobs and problems. I would care more if it was relatable, but it just wasn't for me. It was just too ridiculous. I like reading things that I d...

Pan. Elliott attempted to write a meaningful look into the sordid details of his addiction, his violent sex life, his traumatic past, and murder in middle America, but instead he wrote an untethered, unfocused, disjointed ramble which sounded like a process with no result. True, he does achieve his form of conclusion, of thesis, towards the end, but it wasn't enough to make the book worth it (or to pull it together). It was surprisingly boring for a book about such interesting subject matters.