“…universal and relatable.” That is what Publishers Weekly said about Megan Boyle’s LIVEBLOG (Tyrant, 2018), a raw, genre-defying tome that documents several months of the author’s life in 2013, when she was living with her parents and consuming lots of drugs—a 706-page mental breakdown recorded in real time that Boyle, just now recovering from the haze of making what author Juliet Escoria calls “the Bible for the 21st century,” is finally ready to reflect on.

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS: I remember LIVEBLOG was originally supposed to come out in 2015 but didn’t.

MEGAN BOYLE: Yes, it was supposed to come out November 2015.

BAE: What drugs were you taking?

MB: I was prescribed 10mg Adderall twice a day and quickly worked it up to 30mg twice a day. I rarely used it as prescribed, 2014-2017. But I think the worst of my addiction was in 2014-2015. I would stay awake for days, spending increasingly less time on “actually editing sentences” and more time picking at my skin, which I began to believe had been infected/infiltrated by nanotechnology. I was mostly sleepless and tweaked out, entertaining delusions about what was happening to me, and trying to hold onto my sanity, which began to matter less to me. I stopped responding to texts and emails, and people stopped sending them. One good thing that came from that period is weaning myself off of Xanax, with the help of my psychiatrist. I tried micro (and macro) dosing LSD a few times in 2015, as a substitute for Adderall, which I think didn’t help my mental state other than providing a temporary alternative. I also went on Vyvanse for a couple months in 2015, for the same “temporary alternative” purpose.