But it’s more intricate than that—just look at the title. Elliott is stuck in the midst of near-suicidal despair and a two-year bout of writers block. He’s popping and snorting Adderall in an attempt to snap out of the latter, hoping that getting his thoughts down on the page will help him break through the former. In one of the book’s most resonant links, it turns out that the blurring of truth is what initiated the block in the first place. Elliott returns us, over and over again, to the brutal scenes of his youth—his dad’s violence, his claims that Stephen “killed his mother” (who died of MS when the author was 13), his decision to move after Stephen had run away, refusing to reveal the new address. Elliott has described all of this in his previous books, but his father can’t resist contradicting the facts: He tells a reporter that Stephen was “a liar, a spoiled child from an upper-middle-class home looking for attention.” That “he could come home any time.” He writes Amazon reviews of Elliott’s books with lines like: “Sadly, he’s never been the same since he had electroshock therapy at Reed Mental Hospital.”

“He was trying to obliterate me,” Elliott writes of his father’s attempts to regain control of the story. “He was stealing my past and I was trying to hold on but felt it slipping through my fingers. I started to disappear.” The author was losing his grip. He thinks of Joan Didion’s famous line from her own mashup of memoir and true crime, “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But Elliott had lost the life-sustaining thread. He writes:

“I had based my identity on a year spent sleeping on the streets and the four years that followed. It wasn’t much of a foundation. [My father] was questioning my story, telling anyone who would listen that I had made up the whole thing, my entire life. I began to qualify everything. I wouldn’t say anything about myself without first saying there were other people who remembered things differently. I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history, arranged my experiences to highlight my successes and excuse my failures. How far had I strayed from the truth?”

There is a running theme about “fighting back” in The Adderall Diaries. Elliott didn’t fight back when his dad beat him up. Later, he asserted himself with words, but words are tricky, and Elliott knows this. Someone can simply say, “You’re lying,” and the foundation shakes, it dissolves.

But that question—“How far had I strayed from the truth?”—is honest, not rhetorical. Elliott knows that he, too, has frustrated people he’s written about, that he has contradicted their own versions of the story. He encounters old friends who are angry about the ways he’s presented them in his books. He thinks of another Didion quote, “A writer is always selling someone out.” He blurts out to Sean, who wants attention but doesn’t trust Elliott, “Nobody ever likes what’s written about them.”

Elliott has recorded his unhappy youth in print, but now he’s not so sure. He remembers a fairly easy time in his life, when he had a cushy, if ludicrous job during the dot.com boom. Why hasn’t he written about that before? Is he editing out the high points, swimming in the glass half empty? He needs a new approach to the truth, and at this point in the story, he almost has it. He’s so close.

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