Home / Store / Books / The Adderall Diaries

The Adderall Diaries

The Adderall Diaries

by Stephen Elliott

Published by Graywolf Press

$23.00

Out of Stock

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

—SAM LIPSYTE


In the spring of 2007, a brilliant and well-known computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his beautiful, estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence, and the body is yet to be found. The case takes an unusual twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’ former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of. When a reporter contacts Stephen Elliott about Sturgeon—whose path he has crossed in San Francisco’s underground S&M scene—Elliott is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over his inability to maintain a stable romantic relationship. The reporter’s questions spur Elliott to rethink Sturgeon, and to wonder exactly what kind of person confesses to murders he likely did not commit? Perhaps a man like Elliott’s own father.

So begins a brave and riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton’s celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is a breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation.