This is all in the first half, the book’s dark night of the soul, finding the author attending funerals for his childhood friends, feeling despair at book parties, drifting through a series of S&M relationships with women, and worrying about the long-term effects of his growing reliance on the amphetamine of the title. The prose in these sections has a remarkable emotional complexity—at once wildly sad and charismatic, vulnerable and stubbornly assertive. Elliott is in flux, and we feel that. One of the few things that grounds him is masochism, being tied up and cut (one of the book’s W.G. Sebald-ish photos shows Elliott’s carved-up back). “How could I be so many different people?” he asks, referring to his past as a stripper, a graduate student, a depressive. But nothing can shake his decency. He aspires to be good, whether he’s talking about Hans Reiser or himself. “We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel.” A storyteller himself, Elliott is not going to let himself off the hook.

In the book’s second half, which anchors itself in Reiser’s trial, Elliott solidifies the framework in which he can sort through the conflicting narratives that have left him disconnected from his own history—and that have left a woman dead without an explanation. The recaps of the proceedings are expert. In a style that brings to mind some of Norman Mailer’s best nonfiction, he captures the courtroom’s major players—the lawyers in particular—with verbal agility and moral acumen. Cast under Elliott’s discerning eye, Hans emerges as a remorseless sociopath with a prickly aversion to the truth. Nina’s body hasn’t been found—yet—but key pieces of evidence are missing, particularly parts of Hans’s mother’s car, where the murder probably occurred, and which Hans has washed so thoroughly that it’s found with an inch of water pooled on its floor.

“On the stand he recites the license plate number of the officer who followed him five days after the murder, but can’t remember other, more basic things. He can’t remember where he was when he removed the passenger seat from the car and he can’t remember where he threw it away. He says that he threw it away instead of storing it at his mother’s house because his mother was trying to get custody of [his children] and he wasn’t allowed to be there. But he went there almost every day, and slept at her house at least three times that week. He also removed the rear assembly from the car and threw that away. He says he was going to fill it in with futon foam and bring his mother her new, fixed-up car, a bed on four wheels.”

So here is another story in which a man is attempting to control the facts. Elliott has not only a fascinating story, but an analogue for his own autobiography-in-crisis. Hans can rewrite Nina, a woman who by most accounts was generous, magnetic, a good mother. He can say that she was manipulative, that she was cruel to their children. But there are limits—there’s accountability—and Elliott inhabits these limits with fierce intelligence, grace and a deep empathy for the deceased. And from that space he catches a glimpse of how his own story works—or rather how it can work for him and still exist in the world, where others might try to rewrite it. This high-wire act requires a showdown: Elliott will have to meet his father, and he’ll have to let their truths mingle and clash. It’s messy, a lot like democracy itself.

* * *

After reading The Adderall Diaries, you could make a chart, with lines linking multiple names and themes. Sean, like Elliott’s father, claims to have committed murder, and both of them might be lying. Hans presents Anna as a woman who, hoping for attention, intentionally tried to make her children ill; Elliott’s father, likewise, calls Stephen a spoiled liar. Meanwhile, Elliott’s representations of friends in previous books become analogues for his own father’s representations of him. Keep going: Hans’s computer breakthrough, ReiserFS, is a filing system that decides how a computer organizes its data, and Elliott is deeply concerned with how people structure information to suit their own agendas (in one scene, Elliott rejects 20/20’s attempts to use him in a segment that aims to sensationalize the case). Sean, who grew up in communes, claims that he suffered abuse in the hands of careless adults, just like Stephen does (though in Sean’s case the abuse is sexual). You could keep going. The chart would end up sending vectors all over the place.