The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

From the author of the blockbuster bestseller ''The Game'' comes a shockingly personal, surprisingly relatable, brutally honest memoir, in which the celebrated dating expert confronts the greatest challenge he has ever faced: monogamy and fidelity.

''Most of us are told, from the moment we are old enough to understand a story, that there is a golden path waiting to take us safely through the jungle of life: get a good job, fall in love, get married, have children, and live happily ever after. It sounds simple enough. Yet as a species, we seem to have an incredibly difficult time making it happen. So, one day, I looked around and saw my friends frustrated and neglected in their marriages - some being unfaithful, others white-knuckling it, many surrendering to their fate, and a few living in denial. And I saw myself still unmarried, childless, and, in the biggest disappointment of all to myself, cheating. And I wondered if it was possible to change the odds - and the rules - for myself. The story that follows, however, is not a journey that was undertaken by choice or for the purposes of a book. It is a painfully honest account of a life crisis that was forced on me by my own behavior and its consequences. And as such, it requires sharing a lot of things I'm not proud of - and a few things I feel like I should regret a whole lot more than I actually do. Because, unfortunately, I am not the hero in this tale. I am the villain.''

Neil Strauss became famous to millions around the world as the author of The Game, a funny and slyly instructive account of how he transformed himself from a scrawny, insecure nerd into the ultra-confident, ultra-successful ''pickup artist'' known as Style. The book jump-started the international ''seduction community'' and made Strauss a household name - revered or notorious - among single men and women alike. But the experience of writing The Game also transformed Strauss into a man who could have what every man wants: the ability to date - and/or have casual sex with - almost every woman he met. The results were heady, to be sure. But they also conditioned him to view the world as a kind of constant parade of women, sex, and opportunity - with intimacy and long-term commitment taking a back seat. That is, until he met the woman who forced him to choose between herself and the parade. The choice was not only difficult, it was wrenching. It forced him deep into his past, to confront not only the moral dimensions of his pickup lifestyle but also a wrenching mystery in his childhood that shaped the man that he became. It sent him into extremes of behavior that exposed just how conflicted his life had become. And it made him question everything he knew about himself, and about the way men and women live with and without each other. - - He would never be the same again. - - Searingly honest, compulsively readable, this new book may have the same effect on you.