The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

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I had to pace the audio-read to allow myself to digest, to reflect, to understand why this affected me so much.

Perhaps the problem with most relationships is that the rules start to become more important than the values they're supposed to be representing. This is a lively and well-written book by authors who know the field well and explain difficult ideas clearly and efficiently."—Matti Eklund, Cornell University Strauss is a master storyteller of the human guinea pig non-fiction narrative and really turns introspective here, as he submits to rehab/therapy/non-monogamy/abstinence and all manner of physical and emotional experiment to understand himself, his complicated history, and how he might find happiness in sex and love today. What it means to tell the truth: It is to give someone else her freedom, to allow her to have a reaction even if it leads to negative consequences for you, to give her the voice that lying takes away. His analysis reaches deep enough to be meaningful for every man and woman who has ever been touched by the combination of dysfunctional parenting and Judeo-Christian patriarchal culture.If married men have mid-life crises, men who haven't ever truly been able to commit have no-life crises. And if they're able to see clearly for even just a moment, they start to realise that they're losing more than they're gaining each day they remain stalled on the scenic road of growing up.

For those (to coin Thomas Wolfe) “masters of the universe”, how do we separate the ever-present myths from the realities? Where do the women who stand with them fit in? Why force women into stereotypes , putting them in their place for the purpose of providing a better story of themselves for history? And finally, are we all complicit in the stories we create if the price is high enough?On the micro level I enjoyed for example: the exploration of the marginalisation of (and even worse co-opting or blatant stealing of) female voices and ideas; the idea that a blend of human psychology with mathematical analysis is key to investment success (and it reminded me of the intersection of art-empathy-gut call & data-science-hard facts at the heart of commercial insurance underwriting); the fragmentary ideas in the fourth section about the transition from literary realism to literary modernism (and its equivalent in music). The obviousness of the “reveal” in the fourth section I can live with better – as the book seems to strongly signpost this by discussing (on two separate but importantly linked occasions) someone recounting a detective style novel and someone else (older or wiser) having to effectively pretend that the reveal of the murderer is a surprise.

Work on trying to become a better person and operate closer to your potential than getting bogged down in nonsense By the time we get to find out the truth, I don't think that it matters as strongly as Hernan Diaz thinks. The power of fiction is stronger than the truth here. If one is on the periphery of this brave new world of nonmonogamy, these accounts can add to the knowledge base so an informed reader - men or women - could make decisions about what relationship rules might work personally. Worth reading for that reason. The book is funny, sexy, gross, overwrought, emotional, traumatic, honest, TMI, and complex, but Strauss keeps a fast pace while breaking down the various philosophies, treatments, research, communities, and relationship models - trying each one openly and with plenty of emotional weight at stake. It's like a crash-course in 101 emotional therapy you experience third-hand. Neil Strauss, writer and author, tell the story of the last couple years of his life where he struggled with monogamy, wanting a bit more of an open relationship, to be able to experience other people at the same time as he loved the girlfriend he had.

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Therein lies, I think, the genuinely subversive quality of this novel (and half the joy of reading it): in its determined attention to the gaps, the silences, the evasions, and how it posits these gaps and silences and evasions—this edge of unfinished business—as a challenge to the reader to find out the truth, and most crucially, to avoid complicity in the erasures effected by the story. But it isn’t, because the way he recounts his painful, painful path to this insight is truly riveting.

To survive painful beliefs and feelings, we often mask them with anger. That way, we don't have to feel the shame behind it. The payoff of anger is mastery, control, or power. So the anger makes you feel better and one up.

Unfortunately, its structure ( 4 parts written in different genres) remains more of a marketing tool to promote its ambitions. I think the start ( the novel "Bonds") remains the strongest part. Hernan Diaz writes about the upper class like a modern Henry James, but his narrative is more alert and brutal. The subsequent parts want to answer how much of that fiction was real and look at the schemes that people with power have to build and impose their versions of events. Look, yeah, this is a book about narcissism and if you want to read about a guy who everybody clapped for, the most out-of-control sex addict in the room, and who smirkingly refers to the relief at being de-centered by his harem, then by all means read this, or The Wolf of Wall Street. Any patina of self-humiliation the book claims to show is buried under whatever is left of his crippled mother from being hit by the bus Strauss threw her under.