This review first appeared on murmur.com.

I first read Stephen Elliot’s 2004 novel, Happy Baby, on the strength of McSweeney’s publishing output. The book itself was a plain leatherbound hardcover. On its front was a gold illustration of a man’s hand covering another man’s face. The story itself surprised me. It wasn’t written fancifully or with any particular flair for whimsy or comedy. It was a stark, straightforward story of a boy suffering from abuse, growing up in group homes in Chicago as a ward of the state, and winding through various relationships with varying levels of sadomasochism. What came through to me in the novel was Elliot’s raw honesty as he examines subjects like sexual abuse not for exploitation or forced sympathy, but because it’s a story he must communicate.

The Adderall Diaries, similarly, is about Elliot as an author with writer’s block, who takes on a true crime assignment and ends up writing a memoir.

In 2007, computer programmer Hans Reiser  stands trial, accused of murdering his wife Helen. Elliot is tasked with writing about the trial. There’s an odd twist early in the case as Hans’ friend Sean Sturgeon confesses to a series of unrelated murders. This brings the author more deeply into the case because he knows a bit about Sturgeon — they run in the same S&M circles in San Francisco. As Elliot interviews Sean and continues to follow the trial, he begins to write about his own relationships with women, and also that of his father.

By the time the trial comes to its conclusion, it becomes clear to both author and reader that this book is more memoir than true crime. Elliot has written himself so far into the book, it’s much more about his own life than the trial. The Reiser trial has become a point of fascination for Elliot, and he holds it up as a mirror to his own life as he attempts to examine the estranged relationship he maintains his father.

Elliot writes about the Reiser trial and his own life with a simple, effortless prose. There is no indication in these pages that the writer is trying to be overly clever or pretentious, a descriptor which one might expect when dealing with subjects like the author’s S&M fetishism. In truth, I don’t think the author would even call it a fetish. He simply writes about his dealings with women, and what he gains from pain, submission, and the safety and security found within. This is simply his life, and he makes no effort to either justify or boast. This memoir stands as an exploration of those relationships, and how they all seem to lead inexorably back to his own history with his father. As Hans Reiser stands revealed to the jury through testimony and evidence, Elliot draws his own conclusions about how people’s interpretations of events can be organized and reorganized, each of us inventing our own reality. It’s a simple conclusion, but one that is heartfelt and hard-won over the course of the narrative.