A really lame book review
| September 22, 2010 | Posted by Chin.Musik under book review |
Last week, I had the good fortune to hear Stephen Elliott read from his most recent book, The Adderall Diaries, a memoir. In a word (or two, or three) I ate that sh*t up. I dunno, any book that deals with the problems of identity, memory, the harsh realities of living in an adolescent group home, sexual fetishes and father-son relationships is right up my alley. As a matter of fact, someone who’s read bits of my memoir came up to me after the reading to say I must have been in my glory. I was.
During the Q & A afterwards, I asked him what was the process like in terms of how he dealt with outing his skeletons to the world. He said it was a gradual process, one he was pretty comfortable with by the time he’d penned his 7th book. It occurred to me that the extent to which one is going to show his “true” (using that term skeptically) face to the world is in direct proportion to how much soul-searching he’s done. Ergo, how much hell you’ve put yourself through.
I wanted to ask him a question about some other lines from his book, specifically, ”I can see now that there’s a conclusion but no arc. There’s life and death and all the barely connected things that happen in between” (25). These words really stuck in my craw. What about the journey, I thought. If it’s not about the moments in between, then life is tantamount to a great meaningless pantomime.
Still his book kicks ass. You should read it.
