Dead Versions of Me

A Memoir by Elliott Collinson

Dead Versions of Me is not a redemption story. It's the wreckage after the reckoning.

Told through poetic letters, fragmented reflections, and psychological descent, this semi-autobiographical memoir explores the high cost of immersive storytelling. Elliott didn't just write characters-he became them.

This is a book about what happens when passion turns into possession. What begins as personal reflection transforms into emotional exorcism, charting the collapse of identity as the author dives headfirst into Method Writing-a process that blurred fiction and reality so intensely it fractured his sense of self.

Each chapter acts as a eulogy for the versions of him that didn't survive the performance: the charming ones, the poetic ones, the broken ones still waiting for applause. At the heart of the memoir is Chapter 9: The Allusion Letters - a nine-part descent into ego, grief, false strength, and the aching need to be seen without being solved.

This isn't about healing.

It's about telling the truth so recklessly the past starts answering back.

It's about trauma that doesn't care to be inspirational. Grief without ceremony. Ghosts that don't leave when the story ends - they linger, silent, until written.

Written in the aftermath of what Elliott calls "self-inflicted bipolar storytelling," this memoir is a brutally honest account of creative obsession, mental breakdown, and the thin line between becoming the writer... and becoming the characters.

He didn't set out to be a writer. He set out to survive himself.

From letters penned during the fall of a baseball career, to screenplays haunted by emotionally volatile characters, Dead Versions of Me maps the wreckage left behind when the page becomes the only place you still exist.

This is not a how-to book.

It's a how-you-break book.

For anyone who has:

Lost themselves in the work they thought would save them

Written just to survive the night

Carried characters long after the writing stopped

Wondered if the voice in their head was ever really theirs

"I wasn't writing fiction. I was writing funerals.

And the characters weren't invented - they were versions of me I'd already buried."

"The ghosts didn't leave, they just stopped screaming when I started writing them down."