The Truth Review: A Nine-Voice Memoir That Works

Listen to this one. The Truth is the only Neil Strauss book with an unabridged audiobook, it runs sixteen hours fifty, and it is read by a cast of nine rather than by him alone. A full cast on a memoir sounds like it should not work and it does. Writing 4.5, narration 4.

What the book is

Published in 2015, The Truth is Strauss going back over the decade after The Game and asking what it cost him. It moves through rehab, therapy, open relationships and a serious attempt to work out whether monogamy is something he can do, and it is considerably more uncomfortable than the book that made him famous, which is the point of the subtitle.

It is the fourth move in a long argument he has been having with himself in public, and it is the one where he stops winning it.

Nine voices on a memoir

This is the part worth knowing before you press play, because it is unusual and it sounds like a warning.

The audiobook is not Strauss reading alone. He leads it, and the credit line runs Ione Skye, Jessica Sattelberger, Justin Gunn, Adele Jacques, Mem Kennedy, Carola Madis, Leah Cevoli and John Runnette alongside him.

On paper that is a strange decision. A memoir is one person's account and handing parts of it to eight other people risks turning it into a radio play, which is a different product with a different contract with the listener.

It works. The book is full of other people talking, in transcript, in dialogue, in therapy sessions and arguments, and giving those people their own voices makes the thing legible in a way one man doing all of them would not. It stays a memoir. It is a reading with a cast, not a dramatisation, and the product page says unabridged.

The 4 rather than a higher number is the ordinary business of nine performers not being identically good, which is true of every cast recording ever made.

The editions

The print row is the Open Library record for ISBN 9780062848307, which is the paperback currently in print; the book first appeared in 2015. The audiobook is ASIN B00RMGSJY4 and its "Version: Unabridged" is stated on the product page.

Who it is not for

Anyone who came for more of The Game. This is the book that goes back and looks at the damage, and people who wanted the sequel to the fun one have said so loudly ever since.

Anyone who does not want to spend seventeen hours inside somebody else's therapy. It is candid to a degree that some readers find airless.

And if you are working through him in order, this is the last stop rather than the first. The run and where each book sits is on the Neil Strauss author spotlight.