Neil Strauss - The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

This book covers a period of approximately four years, during most of which my life was a roller coaster and many pledges of anonymity were required, particularly from men who wrecked their familys lives and women whose lives I wrecked. In order to compress it into a manageable length, reduce the complexity, get at the truth of relationships, and preserve anonymity, incidents, people, locations, and situations were moved, removed, compounded, or compressed, and certain identifying details, including names, have been changed. If you are reading this and believe you recognize yourself, think again. Your story is the same as that of most others in this book: You cheated and got caught.

T o my mother and father.

They say a parents love is unconditional.

Lets hope thats still true after you read this book.

P EOPLE ARE MADE

TO NEED EACH OTHER.

BUT THEY HAVENT

LEARNED HOW TO LIVE

WITH EACH OTHER.

RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Ingrid,

If this is you, really, dont read this.

Dont you have email to check or something? Or have you seen the video with that cat whos doing a human-like thing? Its hilarious--maybe you should watch it. This book isnt very good anyway. Ive written others that are much better. Go read one of those.

Seriously, stop reading now. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.

E very family has a skeleton in the closet.

You may know your familys skeleton. You may even be that skeleton. Or you may think that your family is different, that its the exception, that youre one of the lucky ones with a perfect set of parents and no dark family secrets. If so, then you just havent opened the right closet door yet.

For most of my life, I, too, believed I was one of the normal ones. But then I found the right closet door.

It was in my fathers room. The door was white, with chipped paint along the outer edge and a brass doorknob burnished by my fathers large hand. I twisted the knob, emboldened by the hope of finding pornography, my hand over the mark of my fathers.

I was a late-teenage virgin, my parents were out, and I craved the female skin I so desperately lacked access to in real life. Id found a Playboy and a Penthouse in my fathers magazine stack before, so it stood to reason that in a deeper recess of his room, there existed a superior form of pornography: the kind that moves. Real porn.

In the back of his closet, beneath rows of blue cotton-polyester dress shirts with monogrammed pockets, dulled nearly white from years of washing, I found three brown grocery bags filled with VHS tapes. I sat on the floor and examined each one meticulously, careful to return them in the exact reverse order in which Id removed them.

There were no videos labeled as porn, but I knew my father wouldnt be that stupid with my mother around. So I set aside all the unmarked tapes. Since I was never allowed to have a television set of my own, I brought the videos into the family room, where there was a small TV and VCR, old presents from an old uncle.

I felt like I was about to explode.

I loaded the first video, and was disappointed to find a Dizzy Gillespie jazz concert recorded off PBS. I pressed fast-forward, hoping it was just camouflage for a nubile blonde-on-blonde scene. But what came next was an episode of Newhart, followed by Masterpiece Theatre. It was spectacularly unmasturbatory.

The next tape was a recording of The Philadelphia Story, followed by a tennis match, and then nothing but static.

I placed the third videotape into the VCR and watched it sink slowly into the machine. I pressed play, and as soon as I saw what was on that tape, my excitement instantly drained, my skin went cold, and my image of my father as a meek, passive businessman changed forever.

I saw images I didnt even know existed in this world.

And suddenly, as if Id accidentally opened a theater curtain to reveal the rigging, I realized that the reality of my family was very different from the faade.

Promise you wont tell anyone, not even your brother or your father, my mother instructed when I asked her about what Id found.

I promise, I reassured her.

And I never told anyone what I learned that day about my fathers secret life.

That is, until that secret became an acid, corroding my relationships. Until it burned straight through my sense of right and wrong, leaving me alone and despised. Until it landed me in a psychiatric institution, where I was told that for my own sanity, freedom, and happiness, I needed to break my promise and reveal the contents of that tape.

And so I faced a decision: How far would I go to protect my parents? Is it better to betray the people responsible for my existence or to betray that existence itself?

It is a decision that everyone, at some point in life, must make.

Most make the wrong one.

M aybe your dad is living a double life. Maybe your mom is. Maybe one of them is secretly gay or cross-dressing or having an affair or paying for hookers or going to strip clubs or watching Internet porn or just not in love. Maybe both are. Maybe its not your parents, but you or the person you love. But somewhere, there is a skeleton. And that skeleton has a penis. And it will fuck your life.