A powerful narrative of addiction, abuse

"I know everything there is to know about fathers who root against their sons," says Stephen Elliott early in "The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism and Murder."

From that idea of failed fatherhood, he spins a book that begins as a true-crime tale of a murder trial and becomes a searing, self-conscious memoir of drug addiction, obsession and art as a means of survival.

Elliott, founding editor of the hip online culture magazine the Rumpus, folds together three stories: an account of his own childhood and teenage years in Chicago, during which his mother died and he lived at the mercy of his abusive father and as a runaway drug addict; his Adderall-fueled reportage on the murder trial of Hans Reiser, an almost-famous computer programmer convicted of murdering his Russian mail-order bride in 2006, and his descriptions of his masochistic relationships with women during the writing of the book.

Elliott becomes interested in writing about the trial as a way of overcoming a crippling bout of writer's block, but as he digs deeper into Reiser's story, and the story of Reiser's former best friend Sean Sturgeon, who confesses to eight murders at the beginning of Reiser's trial, Elliott realizes these lives hauntingly overlap with his own -- he can't tell one story without the others.

Reiser turns out to be a character not unlike Elliott's father: a sociopath prone to violent outbursts and creepily obsessed with his children. As Reiser is finally dragged out of the courtroom after being found guilty of murdering his wife, the mother of his two children, he yells, "I've been the best father that I know how." Elliott's father's notion of parenthood is equally skewed: "You hit me, I'll hit you back," he tells Elliott during a recent man-to-man talk.

Romances and sexual encounters mostly re-create the violent circumstances of Elliott's past. The details are gory, and unfailingly interesting: "Lissette used to cut me. She kept a knife by my bed," says Elliott of one lover. Another "wants to dress me in women's clothes." It can be almost embarrassing to hear such graphic sexual confessions, but also inspiring: This book is proof Elliott gleans a gritty wisdom from adversity.

"When I'm tied up, it's the woman's responsibility to protect me," he finally realizes. "She becomes my mother and my father. She gets angry for reasons I can't understand, but she doesn't leave. I absorb her anger, which becomes forgiveness." Elliott's story is a convincing case for seemingly self-destructive behavior -- such as S/M or confessional art -- as a safe strategy for people with deep emotional wounds to channel their own pain into something circuitously healing. Those who don't find a way -- like Reiser, Sturgeon and Elliott's father -- can end up engendering the kind of mortal havoc that gave birth to this powerful and unusual book.

Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, freelance writer and vice president of the board of the National Book Critics Circle.