With his memoir The Adderall Diaries, author Stephen Elliott finally leaves behind his fictive skin that had served so well as a cover for the stories in his prior six books not so loosely based on his life, which involved a childhood spent in juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and struggles with addiction. Elliot’s prior novels include Happy Baby, which was a Finalist for The New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award and was selected as a Best Book of 2004 by The Village Voice, Salon.com and Newsday. He has edited for McSweeney’s and MacAdam Cage and his writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, GQ, and Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is also the Founding Editor of The Rumpus. Elliott, whose memoir was just released by Graywolf Press, takes a moment to talk to TFT about money, murderers, and deconstructing mythologies.

THE FASTER TIMES: In an autobiographical post on your culture website The Rumpus about your first published story, you wrote, “Like everything else I wrote it was basically true. My fiction was just reality-PLUS, a slightly more intense version of the world I lived in.” You’ve since published seven books, the latest of which, The Adderall Diaries, is a memoir. What is the difference to you between writing fiction and writing memoir?

STEPHEN ELLIOTT: Wow, that’s a good question. There are more constraints in memoir. You can’t conflate characters, for instance. Or you can, but I don’t. If someone gets upset, you can’t hide behind “Hey, it’s fiction.” The main rule for memoir, in my opinion, is you can’t knowingly lie. That’s a fine line. You can remember something differently from someone else, interpret events differently, but you can’t knowingly make things up. If you’re presenting something as true it has to be true to you.

I think that a lot of memoirists actually try to get away with false conclusions, happy endings, neat narrative tricks that give their story a smoother arc. I don’t believe in doing that.

To state that something is true to your memory puts a lot of constraints on the writing. But the constraints actually make you more creative as you learn to work within them. Of course, a really good memoir should hold up to the scrutiny of a novel. It shouldn’t even matter that it’s true. Books like [Tobias Wolff's] This Boy’s Life and [Michelle Tea's] Valencia are just as good when you think they’re novels as when you think they’re memoirs.

TFT: I’m wondering if writing the memoir was a way for you to reclaim your memory. You wrote in The Adderall Diaries, “I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history.” You also wrote that your father has consistently tried to flout the assertions you make in your novels about the experiences you’ve had in your life such as your claim that you ran away from home at the age of thirteen, and were not able to return home. Has The Adderall Diaries helped you reclaim your memory?

SE: I do think writing is a way to claim stories as your own, and The Adderall Diaries is certainly an example of that. Of course, it’s not about being right. We all have our own stories. My father’s stories are valid and true, even if they contradict my own. But these are my stories, and they are true to me.

I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was like ten years old. Writing is how I figure out how I feel about things, what I remember, what I believe. Usually, I write to make sense of the world. For a while the conflict with my father brought me to a halt. I questioned my own stories, which are the foundation of my identity. I started to disappear. It was a journey to come to a place where I could accept that my history didn’t depend on the agreement of others.

Most kids go home by ten o’clock to their family, but in the group homes there might be twenty of us staying up all night playing dice for t-shirts and tattoos.

TFT: You also have an oral histories project that you’ve been running on The Rumpus, in which you’ve had people you’ve known throughout your life tell their stories about you. I’m wondering if this has to do with a desire to distill from their experiences a collective memory that validates your own. What motivated the oral histories project?

SE: I just think the people I grew up with are really fascinating. Because I spent my adolescence in group homes, I had a much larger social network than most people. Most kids go home by ten o’clock to their family, but in the group homes there might be twenty of us staying up all night playing dice for t-shirts and tattoos. It’s fascinating interviewing all these people. I call it “An Oral History of Myself” because I’m the connection between everybody. But it’s really about them. It always ends up being about them.

Through the interviews I’ve come to realize some of the shared myths of our childhood. Like, everyone remembers robbing parking meters. It’s the one thing that gets brought up in almost every interview. “We used to rob parking meters.”

TFT: You were writing a book part of which involved a man convicted of murder [Hans Reiser], and your time sitting through his trial as well as communicating with him face to face though you weren’t a journalist. What drew you to this person as subject matter? You turned away an offer from 20/20 to use you in a segment to sensationalize the case, so it seems the intent wasn’t mercenary.

SE: Was it mercenary? Was it not mercenary? It’s not so cut and dry, I think. What drew me to the trial initially was that Hans Reiser’s best friend, Sean S., confessed to eight murders. Hans was accused of killing his wife and his wife had left him for Sean. Sean and I had a lot of links from the San Francisco BDSM community. I even did a bondage photo shoot in his house back in 1999. The murders Sean was confessing to were all people who had abused him when he was a child. I had also been abused as a child. So I was really drawn to Sean’s story. We met a few times and then he disappeared. By that point I was immersed in Hans’s trial. But there’s this other thing going on. My father also confessed to a murder in his unpublished memoir. I had been holding onto that information for a long time, wondering what to do about it.

I had become a literary fundamentalist.

TFT: A couple of things I really liked and was immediately drawn to in The Adderall Diaries were your transitions and your compression of time, which gives it an incredible amount of energy. Do you work with a specific eye towards achieving those ends?

SE: That’s nice of you to say. Honestly, I don’t work with a specific eye toward any end. I just write and write and edit and edit, like many creative writers do, and slowly a story emerges. Though that’s not always true. Sometimes a story doesn’t emerge. Twice I’ve spent a year on a book only to realize it wasn’t going to work. I don’t know how else to write. That’s why I don’t pitch books. I don’t know what they’re going to become but whatever my initial thoughts might be, the finished product rarely bears a resemblance to it.

TFT: Are there any writers you’ve read who when you first read them made you feel that you were allowed to write the way you wanted to write?

SE: Well, early on it was Charles Bukowski all the way. He was a total outsider and he wrote about himself, but he made it interesting. Reading Bukowski was a revelation. I was also really into [Jack] Kerouac’s On The Road and I loved Nelson Algren who said something along the lines of, “Sometimes the poor and uneducated are also stupid and mean.”

A little later I arrived in San Francisco and started reading with the open mic poets there like Daphne Gottlieb. I read Valencia by Michelle Tea and that blew my mind.

I was a history major in college and I used to look down at all the English students reading Raymond Carver. I thought they didn’t know anything. But I was the one that didn’t know anything. Finally, in my late twenties I started to get really into Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. I started to see all the things that were going on behind their sentences. I wanted to do that. I became obsessed with showing and not telling. Especially as it comes to motives.

But I passed through that as well. More recently I read Stoner by John Williams. It’s a perfect book. Williams knows when to show and when to tell. I had become too dogmatic about showing and not telling. I had become a literary fundamentalist, which is a very boring thing. Williams is one of the writers that snapped me out of that. And Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles kind of helped me get back to where I was when I started writing. Chelsea Girls reminded me of the “why,” which is always important.

Because television is the intersection of art and business and there is no intersection of art and business.

TFT: What was the impetus behind starting The Rumpus? Will writers ever make money from work they publish online? And what do you think a model that enables that will look like?

SE: The impetus behind starting The Rumpus was finishing The Adderall Diaries and not having anything else to do with my life. I don’t know about writers making money online; I don’t know about writers making money. I’ve written seven books, I’m thirty-seven years old, and still I share a big one-bedroom apartment with two roommates. The literary writers I know are making a living teaching in universities, or writing business documents on the side. The vast majority of literary writers have never been able to make a living just from writing. I think it’s been that way for as long as I’ve been writing and I don’t know if that will ever change.

If you want to be a literary writer you have to do it for a reason other than money. That’s if you’re going to be someone like me who really only writes what he wants to write. I’m lucky that I can scrape by doing this. But I would never do it for the money. This past year I got involved in a project that seemed really fun, but there were business people involved. It was a television show about something I was actually interested in. But creatively it was a disaster. Because television is the intersection of art and business and there is no intersection of art and business.

So that doesn’t exactly answer your question. I think it’s possible for literary writers to supplement their income with writing and hopefully that will happen online. But the people with money, the businessmen, will never understand the value of the art to the artist. Money is not a good reason to get into creative writing.

TFT: You briefly published The Rumpus on Amazon’s Kindle. What was that experience like, working with Amazon?

SE: I’ve met some people that work at Amazon that I really like but ultimately Amazon is an evil, predatory corporation. This is really highlighted with their policy toward publishing blogs on the kindle. If someone subscribes to your blog on the kindle you get 30% and they get 70%. On the one hand it’s money you didn’t have. On the other hand it’s insulting that you would do all the work and create all the content and they would keep 70%. I’d rather give it away for free.

TFT: Has the publishing process of The Adderall Diaries been any different than that of your other books?

SE: Yes and no. This is my seventh book and every time you publish a book it’s different. I’ve also edited four books, so I really have eleven experiences. My editor for this book, Ethan Nosowsky, is a fantastic editor. Dave Eggers edited Happy Baby and he’s a genius. It was Dave’s idea to tell the story backwards, for example. Ethan is an entirely different kind of editor from Dave. He’s really hands on. I could call Ethan anytime and say, “I think I’m going to move this paragraph in the third chapter,” and he would know exactly what I was talking about.

I was much more involved with the publishing of this book than I was with my other books. I’ve learned over time that nobody in publishing knows anything, myself included. I used to defer to editors and designers and publicists, I don’t do that anymore. I got Alvaro Villanueva to design the cover. He’s one of the very best book designers in the world, in my opinion. I didn’t tell Graywolf [Press] Alvaro was designing the cover, I just sent them the design one day. Of course, the great thing about Graywolf, is they’re willing to put up with me and let me be closely involved. A more corporate house would probably have locked me out. I can be kind of annoying.

A girl I had dated previously was also on the set, and Madeline was there with these two naked guys on chains.

TFT: What’s been the best thing about working with Graywolf Press?

SE: Everything’s great about Graywolf. First, they’re a non-profit. The only reason they publish a book is because they love it. All these corporate presses have become corrupt, and lost sight of why they exist in the first place. If you consider yourself an artist you’re always going to be happier with a publisher like Graywolf or McSweeney’s.

The first best thing about Graywolf, as I mentioned, is Ethan Nosowsky. I turned down significantly more money from Norton to go with Graywolf and Ethan was the main reason for that. But I like everybody there, Fiona [McCrae], Erin [Kottke], Marisa [Atkinson]. We’re on the same page as far as what’s important to us.

TFT: I’m curious about your decision to go with Graywolf over Norton, and your statement, “A more corporate house would probably have locked me out.” I think I understand what you mean, but I don’t want to impose my reasoning on your statement. Would you humor me and be a little more specific about what you meant with that statement, and about your decision to choose a small press over a large one.

SE: Well, Norton offered more money. It was an incredibly difficult decision. I struggled with it for a week. It felt counter-intuitive to take less money from a smaller press. But Ethan had edited some of my favorite books. Also, it was a lot of money for Graywolf and maybe not so much for Norton, so there was the big fish small pond thing. And I just felt that Graywolf wanted it more. The editor at Norton wasn’t available to talk to me about the book for close to a week, so I knew I wasn’t a priority there.

At the time I was selling the book I was only 80% done. I didn’t really know yet what the book was about. So the most important consideration for me was who was going to help me finish the book so that the book was the best book it could possibly be. That has definitely borne out. When you publish a book and you can tell yourself this is as good a book as I’m capable of writing, then it’s hard to regret any of the decisions that got you to that point. And I definitely feel that way about The Adderall Diaries.

TFT: You’ve edited four books. What was the most challenging thing for you as an editor? And what was the most rewarding thing for you as an editor?

SE: I edited one book for McSweeney’s, Where To Invade Next. That’s an incredible book. I also edited two books of politically inspired fiction for MacAdam/Cage and one book of politically inspired erotica, Sex For America, for Harper Perennial. What I love about editing is soliciting work from writers I love. Especially when they’re not well known writers. I love editing. I’ve spent the last nine months doing more editing than writing. It’s really fulfilling. Though I wouldn’t want to do it for hire. I’m only interested in editing for books I’m putting together or for The Rumpus.

TFT: What is a typical (if there is such a thing) day in the life of Stephen Elliott? If there is no typical day, let’s say yesterday…

SE: Yesterday was a little crazy. I’ve been doing some work with Kink.com. I can’t go into too much detail about that. I ended up participating in this live porn shoot celebrating the opening of The Upper Floor. Porn is not really my thing, but there was no way around it. I’d been having some kind of affair, or relationship, with Maitress Madeline, who runs the Men In Pain website. A girl I had dated previously was also on the set, and Madeline was there with these two naked guys on chains. Madeline’s girlfriend was also part of the porn shoot and she was naked and chatting with the customers online and for a while I was her desk. Then I got smacked around quite a bit. So now I’m in a porn, again.

That was yesterday. But tomorrow might be more typical. Tomorrow I’m going to do some writing, then work on The Rumpus. And in the evening I’m going to meet three friends and we’re going to play bridge.

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