The Truth Neil Strauss Review: A Reckoning, Not a Sequel

The Truth is the book where Neil Strauss goes back over The Game and asks what it cost him, and it is a genuine reckoning rather than a sequel keeping the run going. It is the clearer and better organised of the two, and I have it at 4.25 against The Game's 4.0. Read it rather than listen to it first, even though the nine-voice audiobook is good.

I read The Game first, and I read The Truth when it came out. I wanted to see how it would compare, and what had happened to Strauss after the pickup artist years.

I was not in a relationship at the time. The book corrected some of my views on relationships anyway, and I carried that into one I was in about a year later.

What is The Truth about?

It is Strauss's memoir of confronting sex and love addiction, and of testing what intimacy, monogamy, and recovery actually require.

The book is built as a prologue, five sections called Doors, and an epilogue. Door three, "Alternatives", is by far the longest stretch in it.

Is it a real reckoning, or a franchise move?

This is the question everyone arrives with, and it is genuinely open in print. Mike Sacks, writing in GQ when the book came out, framed it as possibly an act of atonement and possibly an effective marketing scheme, and deliberately declined to say which.

Having read both books, I think it completes the circle.

I read The Game as an investigation rather than a manual. A journalist went into a subculture, learned it from the inside, and reported back. The Truth reads as a genuine reckoning with that book rather than a sequel keeping the run going, and that is the main reason to pick it up. It is worth saying that I did not go into the first book thinking it was a how-to, so I am not reading this one as penance.

Why it scores higher than The Game

This is a clearer book than The Game, and a more relatable one. It is better organised and more cohesive, and it comes at the same territory from a different point of view.

That is the difference between the two, and it is why they should not sit at the same number.

What does the nine-voice cast do to a memoir?

The cast works, and it adds to the mix rather than sitting on top of the book as a production gimmick.

Strauss reads his own part, and he is better here than he was reading The Game. That is the same man reading his own life in both recordings, and the difference is a full half point on this site.

The sharper thing is what the other eight voices do to the shape of it. It became a scene rather than an account. With the other people voiced, it felt like listening to a play rather than being told what happened. That is the production doing something a single narrator could not, and it is why the cast is worth having.

It never tipped into re-enactment, though, and the distinction matters if you are buying. It can feel theatrical in the way scenes are built and revealed, but it remains retrospective and self-questioning rather than asking you to relive or reproduce the behaviour. This is an unabridged reading with several voices, not a dramatisation.

Check the credit line before you buy

There are two English audiobook listings and they are not the same product.

The one I heard credits nine performers: Strauss, Ione Skye, Jessica Sattelberger, Justin Gunn, Adele Jacques, Mem Kennedy, Carola Madis, Leah Cevoli and John Runnette. It runs 16 hours 50 minutes and is unabridged.

There is a second listing, sold in Canongate territories, credited to Neil Strauss alone. Whether the audio underneath differs could not be established, and nothing says a second performance was recorded. But the credit line is the tell, and if you land on the one naming Strauss by himself, nothing I have said about the cast applies to what you are buying.

Should you read it or listen to it?

If you are starting cold, read it. The audio is good and the cast is a real addition, but print is what I would put in someone's hands first.

The reason is control. In print I can stop whenever I want, and stopping is where the work happens. A memoir like this leaves gaps, and with Strauss I can fill those in my own head more effectively when I am setting the pace myself. Audio keeps going. That is fine for a story that carries you, and it is the wrong shape for a book you need to keep putting down.

What kind of uncomfortable is it?

Mostly emotional and confessional. Strauss is unusually candid about compulsion, betrayal, shame, and the damage caused to people around him.

That may be hardest for readers sensitive to explicit sexual material, addiction narratives, or a narrator who can sometimes seem to be explaining himself while he is still learning to take responsibility.

Two named reviewers found the middle of the book slow, and both point at the same stretch. The Kirkus notice calls the non-monogamy exploration "oddly tedious" while finding the introspection compelling, and Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard, who did not get on with the book, wrote that it takes around 350 pages to reach a fairly elementary realisation. That is Door three, the longest section in the book.

What stayed with me

The book's real subject is not sex but the loneliness and old wounds beneath the need for it. Recovery begins to feel possible when he can name those patterns in front of other people, partly because he is no longer carrying them alone.

What should you know before you start?

Graphic sexual content and drug use, including in sexualised settings. Beyond those, the book works through infidelity, betrayal and broken trust; sex and love addiction, its treatment and its recovery language; and childhood and family trauma alongside intensive therapy.

Those additions come from named critics and library catalogue records rather than from a publisher or author-approved list, so treat them as guidance drawn from the record. One caution that is worth stating plainly: this is one man reporting his own experience, not a clinical account, and the treatment language in it should not be read as guidance for anybody else.

Who should read The Truth, and who should skip it?

Read it, especially if you have read The Game. That is where it pays off most, because the two books are one arc and the second one is what the first one was heading toward whether it knew it or not. It is also the clearer and better organised of the two on its own terms.

Skip it if you are looking for a practical relationship guide, a clean recovery narrative, or a settled argument for one relationship model. Its value is in the messy self-examination, not in neat answers.

Common questions

Is The Truth a sequel to The Game? Not in the sense of continuing it. It goes back over the same decade and asks what it cost, which is why I would call it a reckoning. Reading The Game first is not required, but it is where this one pays off most.

Why does the paperback have a different subtitle? The 2015 hardback is subtitled An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships; the paperback in print now is An Eye-Opening Odyssey Through Love Addiction, Sex Addiction, and Extraordinary Relationships. Same book, same 448 pages, and it can look like two titles on a listing page.

How long is the audiobook, and who reads it? Sixteen hours fifty minutes, unabridged, with nine credited performers led by Strauss himself. A separate listing sold in some territories credits Strauss alone, so check the performer credits before buying.

Is the audiobook a dramatisation? No. It is an unabridged reading with a full cast, which is a different product. Nothing in it is adapted or re-enacted, though the voiced sections do play more like a scene than a straight reading.