STEPHEN ELLIOTT HAS written about a lot of things: growing up in group homes (Happy Baby), BDSM (My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up) and the American electoral process (Looking Forward to It). But in The Adderall Diaries, out this month, Elliott tackles territory that’s unfamiliar even to him.The book begins with Elliott trying to talk his acquaintance Sean Sturgeon into discussing his recent confession to eight murders and then moves through the murder trail of Sturgeon’s best friend and the ups and downs of Elliott’s own rocky life in frank and, sometimes, startling detail.
While in Portland, Ore., for the first stop on his book tour, Elliott talked to New York Press about true crime, book design and the struggle to do something shocking on stage.
Your new book has a number of different plots, characters and twists. When you started writing The Adderall Diaries, what did you think your focus would be?
I didn’t know what the book was about until I was 90 percent into it. I never pitch books or articles; I never know what I’m writing when I start. My initial thing was that I had writer’s block for a long time, I had stopped taking Adderall, so I started taking it again and I was writing whatever came into my mind. I was just trying to get my head straight so I was writing all the time to figure out what I felt and who I was.
Within a week of that, I found out about Sean Sturgeon had confessed to the murders. I had done a bondage photo shoot in his house and we had overlapped in the BDSM world in San Francisco. I knew people who had known the guy for 10 years, so I thought I would write a true crime book. That’s what Truman Capote and Norman Mailer did; they were novelists, and those were the best books they wrote.Then it became obvious that it wasn’t a true crime book at all but more of a memoir. Really, it’s a book about being a writer and what that means. It’s not a memoir, but a book about the search for a memoir.
So, then how did you find the experience of writing this book different from the previous ones?
Each one has been different.This was really like going into a cave—seven days a week, six to eight hours a day for 16 months. I sat and I wrote and I thought about these murders and I followed these threads without any idea what the central plot of this thing was. Whatever popped up, I just followed it as best as I could. It was my first memoir—I’ve written four novels and stories—and my fiction is all very autobiographical, but I actually believe this to be true. I wrote a lot about depression and drug addiction, I’d written a lot about sex, but this was different.
True, you have written a lot about sex and drugs—you’re very open and honest about your life. In writing this book about yourself, was there anything that you were surprised you admitted?
I know that when people write memoir, you often hear, ‘I wrote this book, but I’m no longer that person.’That’s one of the common things people say, but I can’t help but be skeptical of that, it’s a little too easy. I wonder if they’re not just making an excuse for the failure of the book.When they say that this isn’t actually an accurate picture, the larger question is can the self really be captured. Most of life is happy and boring moments, most of life isn’t worth writing about. I try to engage with all of this, and hopefully the book is getting at some sense of the complete self. I think the book is still a reasonable, accurate portrait of who I am.
The design of the book is really interesting: There’s no paper cover, there is almost Hardy Boys–like print on the hardback itself and there are documents and photos placed within the text. How important is the design of the book to you as an author?
It’s really important to me, and what I’ve learned from doing seven books is that nobody knows anything. I don’t know anything about publishing, but nobody else does either. I used to just let the publishers do the cover and I would believe them when they told me things. I trusted them. Now I don’t do that anymore.
For The Adderall Diaries, I went to Alvaro Villanueva, who I think is the best book designer in the world, and I asked if he would do a cover, and before Graywolf had a design, I brought them this and they had to use it or come up with something better.You’re going to spend years writing something and not participate in the design—which is the reason half of the readers will pick up the book?
On Oct. 7 you’ll be at the Happy Ending Reading Series where authors are required to take a risk on stage. What can we expect from you?
I’ve done a lot of things [on stage]; I’d have to figure out something I’ve never done before. I’ll have to think of something. I didn’t know that.
> Stephen Elliot
Oct. 7, Happy Ending Reading Series, Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & E. 4th St.), 212-539-8777; 7, $15. Also Oct. 8 at BookCourt and Oct. 11 at Idlewild.
