In The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliot mingles the coverage of a San Francisco murder trial to which he was marginally connected with an unpacking of his own troubled past: an abusive dad who may have killed a man himself, a mother he cared for as she died of multiple sclerosis, a series of group homes. With friends overdosing and committing suicide all around him, he found refuge in drugs and violent sex, working as a stripper, a professor, and a writer. The

—Marion Winik