“Name?” asks the barista at the cafe, ready to write on a takeaway coffee cup. The writer Neil Strauss thinks for a moment and says, “Let’s go with Clive.” He steps outside, into the California sun, to wait for his drink.

A decade ago, Strauss was a notorious figure: the guy who wrote that book The Game, the one about seduction, which seemed to endorse all manner of queasy notions about what it was OK for men to do on the pull. The Game promised to teach its readers how to become better “pick-up artists”, and in doing so have more sex. It sold 2.5m copies and Strauss, who all his life had been a dweeby music journalist, was transformed. He became a Corvette-driving wearer of flash suits, a serial dater of models, admired by those he’d influenced and reviled in other quarters – thought to be an advocate of sleaze who’d only help blur the lines of millennial bro culture.

These days, at 46, Strauss is different. Maybe not change-his-name-to-Clive different, but he’s a husband, and a father, and stupidly in love on both fronts. Whereas he once lived in a Hollywood man-mansion that (by his own account) often had used condoms floating in its jacuzzi, he now lives in relative domestic seclusion in Malibu. It used to be that Strauss arranged seminars for men on how to become better players. Now, he arranges seminars for them on how to become better men. The shiny suits are gone in favour of a Pacific-side uniform of surfer T, loose wristbands, espadrilles. He fits right in, this lazy afternoon, with the crowd hanging around outside a Malibu coffee shop.

While waiting for his drink, Strauss falls into conversation with a group that includes two middle-aged tourists and a young woman. The woman is in her 20s – tanned, blond, wearing denim short-shorts. Game-klaxon! I watch to see how Strauss will react to her, only he doesn’t. He chats with the tourists, about nothing much. Then he chats with her, about nothing much. And then he walks away.

“The old me would have been performing everything for her attraction,” Strauss says when we’re out of earshot. “Thinking of sex with her. Or how to lure her away from her boyfriend, what have you. Even in, like, a work meeting – if there was a woman in that meeting, everything I said was for her, to get her phone number afterwards.”

And now?

“I’m attracted to people, sometimes. But I think that part of my brain was trained for years. Constantly, wherever I went, whenever I walked into a room, these little lights would go on on a switchboard in my head.” The switchboard is still there, he says, only now anyone can illuminate it; anyone interesting. “I can relate to people on a human level.”

Strauss with his son. Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian

As he would acknowledge, Strauss is no switchboard-illuminating beauty himself. “Shorter than I’d like to be,” he wrote in The Game. “My eyes are small and beady... To say my hair is thinning would be an understatement.” That book went on to tell how he immersed himself in the world of “pick-up artistry”, various experts in the field helping to remould him from a balding “lump of nerd” into someone who “ruled the world of seduction”. Strauss explained to his readers the tricks he’d been taught: intricate Sun Tzu-style manoeuvres that included negging (or feigning a lack of interest in order to reduce a woman’s self-esteem) and caveman-ing (which, as the book’s glossary had it, was “to directly and aggressively escalate physical contact” with someone). “As soon as you ask yourself whether you should or you shouldn’t,” one of The Game’s lessons reads, “that means you should.”

Ten years on, it is difficult to read this without anxiety. In an age of consent lessons on campus and school education on the harmful effects of pornography, the conversation has changed. So has Strauss. He tells me that, without knowing it at the time, he was a pretty troubled man when he wrote The Game. Indeed, in the decade since the book’s publication, he has been through all manner of personal difficulties – periods of therapy, loneliness, heartbreak, depression. A new book, out this month, describes these upheavals and the eventual inner peace the author found in domesticity. Strauss has titled his book The Truth, although for a while, he tells me, he thought he’d call it Game Over.

Clive-marked coffee in hand, Strauss leaves the cafe and heads for home, which is a large, white-walled villa on a hill. Just inside the front door there’s a piled-up wetsuit, left where it fell after his morning surf. On a shelf near his study, Strauss keeps a framed letter that was sent to him by Phil Collins, the pop star writing to tell the journalist to fuck off, after a negative write-up in Rolling Stone. The villa has an easy, dishevelled feel to it – baby-rearing equipment in the kitchen, circle of dog poo untended on the patio – but it’s still a grand and imposing place.

The House The Game Built, I suggest. Strauss chuckles awkwardly. He says he’s had other books that have sold well, too. Biographies of rock bands, porn stars, CEOs. “We take these short cuts in our culture,” he says. “We get one piece of information about people and we just assume it’s them for the rest of their lives. It seems like we don’t allow for the possibility of change. But, I mean, we only learn from our mistakes, right?” Is that a word he’d use now for The Game – a mistake?

I wouldn’t be married, or be here, if it wasn’t for the experiences of that book

Strauss says no. “I wouldn’t be married, or be here, if it wasn’t for the experiences of that book.” He says it’s more a case of coming to have a wincing fascination about some of its content. Feeling a healthy sort of shame. “Like, when you’re 10 years old, you’re embarrassed for running around outside naked when you were a five-year-old, right? And when you’re five, you’re embarrassed that you shit in your pants when you were one. I hope always to regret and be embarrassed by anything I’ve done five or 10 years earlier. I hope to regret and be embarrassed by this discussion five years from now. Because then I know I’m growing and changing.”

Strauss grew up sexually frustrated, and moved into adulthood that way. A quiet, sheltered kid from Chicago, he got dumped on the night of his high school prom, remained bleakly single through college and then, having made himself into an access-all-areas rock journalist for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, managed to secure only one memorable kiss via his cool job – from the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. A book about pick-up artistry was suggested to him by an editor at HarperCollins.

The subject intrigued Strauss, in part because he was very lonely at the time. He was an expert quizzer of famous people, able to draw out the Snoops and Britneys to an uncommon degree. Still, he felt he had no natural flair for flirting in the real world.

“My longest interactions with attractive women were during haircuts,” Strauss recalls in his new book, admitting that he would sometimes browse mail-order-bride catalogues, imagining it the only way he’d ever wind up sharing a life with someone. Willing himself to become a bolshie approacher of strangers in bars – sarging, to use another phrase The Game popularised – felt all wrong when Strauss first tried it. Then it felt OK. He overcame his shyness around women and started having more sex. He tells me he always had the intention of pulling free from the world of pick-up artistry when the book was finished.

This was not so easily done. After its release in 2005, The Game spent a month on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Two years later, and with apparent reluctance, Strauss published a sequel. (First sentence: “I didn’t want to write this book.”) He attended conferences and signings. He endorsed a Game board game. He kept on spending, by his reckoning, “thousands of hours, thousands of dollars” in bars – preying. It was a lifestyle, Strauss says, that fast became “a recipe for self-hatred”.

Around 2010, he met and fell in love with a Mexican-born model named Ingrid De La O. She was perfect, Strauss thought, their relationship together “the best I’d ever had”. Yet he found he couldn’t stop pursuing other women and cheating on Ingrid. When she learned about the cruellest of his infidelities (her best friend, a church car park), Ingrid agreed to forgive Strauss only on the condition he be treated for sex addiction. So he entered rehab for three months. Here his problems really began.

By opening up his psyche to trained therapists for the first time, Strauss learned he had quite an assortment of mental and emotional conditions. In short order, he was diagnosed with anxiety syndrome, depressive disorder, two forms of sexual disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It was like a hammer hitting me on the head,” he says. “I really thought I was normal.”

Out of rehab, still in some degree of turmoil, Strauss got back together with Ingrid, but managed just a fortnight together before splitting again. She started seeing other people. Strauss, meanwhile, went to visit a brain doctor who told him that he’d spent so long trying to figure out how to seduce women for The Game, he might have corrupted himself permanently; that pursuing women was “so deeply ingrained, you’re not going to be able to just walk out of here and stop it”.

Indeed, he was not. There were chaotic flings with a Vegas showgirl, with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and with a woman called Sage with whom he had an open relationship before she left him for two Mexicans. Strauss travelled to Europe to attend sex parties, and later moved to live in a free love commune in California. There was a lot of wallowing, Strauss says, not all of which made it into the pages of The Truth. “There’s only a certain number of ways you can write about depression before your reader reaches for Harry Potter.”

You suspect journalistic motivation in the sex-party trip and his enrolment in the commune (Strauss was writing as he went). But he sounds honest when he tells me it was the act of finishing chapters, and reading them over, that pushed on his recovery. He came to see that his years researching and writing The Game had made him manipulative and selfish, “following a shallow path to self-esteem”, as he describes it now. “My thinking was, ‘If this woman’s going to be naked with me, I must be OK.’ But it doesn’t last.”

He leads us on to his balcony, where we sit on weatherproofed sofas. It’s a scorching day. His wife stays indoors, in the cool, looking after their son. Throughout my visit, I catch only glimpses of her. She has requested not to be interviewed for this article, a reluctance I can well understand. His wife is Ingrid, the much-messed-about girlfriend who first insisted he seek treatment.

What happened there, I ask.

He has the raw-red eyes of the parent of a six-month-old. He looks happy and exhausted. ‘It isn’t boring,’ he says

After a whole load of therapy and self-examination, Strauss explains, they met at a wedding. Having worked hard to earn back her trust (and after ceremoniously cleaning his couch, “removing all DNA traces of communes, triads and open relationships”), the two married in 2013. Their son was born this spring.

In his Game years, it was Strauss’s great fear that, by settling down, he’d miss out on “options, variety, adventure, discovery, novelty, intensity”. That life would be boring. Well?

Strauss laughs. He has the bemused, raw-red eyes of the parent of a six-month-old. His beard shows grey. He looks happy and absolutely exhausted. “It isn’t boring,” he says.

Therapy, marriage, fatherhood were not the only things that prompted Strauss to change his thinking. There’s a fascinating moment in his new book when he describes being the target of an unwanted seduction himself. Shortly after he reunited with Ingrid, he met a woman in a bar who knew of his books and seemed to want to sleep with him. She sarged him, basically – kneeling down and miming giving him a blowjob. “It was a very educational experience to have it inverted,” he tells me. Embarrassing in the moment, unpleasant when he had to tell her no. But it also exposed to him the fallacy of The Game’s teachings.

“I think that a lot of guys who read The Game, they think that they’re fooling or tricking women. But most women are smart enough to know exactly what you’re doing. They just might like you enough to go along with it. I think one of the misconceptions is that someone else can be tricked into doing something they don’t want to.”

It’s the seducer-in-training who’s being tricked?

‘A lot of The Game was about men’s own fears. It was more about being terrified of rejection, and getting over that. It was never meant to be an advocacy of a lifestyle.’ Photograph: Chris Buck/The Guardian

“Exactly. A lot of it was about men’s own fears. A technique to end up making out? You’re not going to make out with someone who doesn’t want to make out with you. It was more about being terrified of rejection, and getting over that. The techniques got him there. Not her.”

Strauss acknowledges this might have been lost on some of The Game’s readers and adherents. Lost on a wider world, too. “It was really a book about scared men who were afraid of women. But then it became a part of the culture. And it became a reason for women to be afraid of guys.” He’s sad about that. “It was never meant to be an advocacy of a lifestyle, even though it’s come to symbolise one.”

Strauss is trying to do something about this. Even a decade later, he has found he still has Game readers who look to him expectantly. They follow him on social media, subscribe to his mailing list. “I was just a music writer. Then I did a book about, like, how I learned not to be lonely and get out of friend-zone with girls. And suddenly men wanted to learn from me, which I hadn’t anticipated. I think a lot of those people who started to listen to me wanted instruction, advice – life guidance.”

Will he be able to take The Game’s readers with him on his next phase?

“I absolutely think about half The Game audience will not be ready for or connect with my new book,” he says, “and that’s fine.” He’ll keep offering nudges, though. When his son was born, Strauss put a baby picture on his blog along with the message: “If you truly want to understand life, then at some point create or nurture one [of these].”

He tells me he does not regret writing The Game, nor what people might have taken away from it. (“The book was a signpost, saying who I was at the time.”) Even so, when I suggest it would be quite some act of cosmic bean-balancing if he could take that Game-steered generation and convince them it was impressive to be a steadfast partner and parent, Strauss nods eagerly. “I think I do that.”

The seminars he arranges these days tend to focus on ways for men to become more content or confident without resorting to cynical bar-trawling. “It used to be that, if I wasn’t OK with myself, she was going to make me OK with myself – because she’s beautiful, because she likes me. But if she doesn’t like me or respond to me, then I’m not OK, I’m a failure. The goal now is really to be OK with yourself, to not need anything else. And maybe once you’re OK with yourself, you can see people as they are, without them having to give commentary on who you are or what your status is.”

To this end, Strauss has convened seminars on improving posture and public speaking, dressing better, eating better. And there have been more emotionally-charged gatherings: the guest speaker at one recent event, Strauss says, was the therapist who helped him through his own post-Game breakdown.

Cultural shorthand, Strauss knows, will have him down as the creep who wrote The Game for a while yet. Maybe always. He’s interviewed enough troubled celebrities over the years to understand that public reputation is beyond an individual’s sway, “that if you think you’re going to control what society thinks of you, you’re in for a frigging disappointment”. He’s relieved to have moved on, anyway. “The way I think about it is that you go through passages and stages of life. And the question is, can you keep growing? Or are you going to get stuck somewhere?”

It’s time for me to leave. Strauss’s son is due up from his nap, and the author and his wife have errands to run. Outside the villa, in the driveway, Strauss and I wait for a cab to collect me. The vintage Corvette from his Game days is parked out there. It’s a handsome machine – low-roofed, thick-wheeled – but it has the rather dusty and forlorn look of a car that has been stationary a while.

The Corvette doesn’t run any more, Strauss admits. “It’s basically a hollow shell.” He points to the machine parked next to it. An electric golf buggy – boxy, small, nakedly ridiculous. If he needs to get about the neighbourhood, Strauss says, he hums around in that.

The day I went to sex therapy: an extract from The Truth, by Neil Strauss

“What are you here for?” the nurse asks me.

“Cheating.”

She says nothing. I think about that word. It sounds lame. I’m in a hospital because I couldn’t say no. So I add the other reason I’m there: “And, I guess, to learn how to have a healthy relationship.”

I think of Ingrid, whose heart I broke, whose friends threatened to kill me. The nurse looks up. It is the first time she’s made eye contact. She smiles sympathetically and continues looking through my intake folder. I ask if she thinks I’m really an addict. “I’m not an addiction specialist,” she says. “But if you’re cheating on your relationship, if you’re visiting porn sites, or if you’re masturbating, that’s sex addiction.”

She opens a drawer, removes a red square of paper, and writes my first name and last initial on it in black marker. Then she slips it into a small plastic sleeve and loops a long piece of white string through it. “You’re in red two,” she says. “You’re required to wear your badge at all times.”

“What does red two mean?”

“The tags are colour-coded. Red is for sex addicts. And the red two group is in therapy with Joan.” She then picks up a large poster board from the floor and holds it on top of the desk, facing me. There are eight huge words on it: Joy, Pain, Love, Anger, Passion, Fear, Guilt, Shame.

“This is called a check-in,” she says. “You’ll be required to check in four times a day and report which emotions you’re feeling. Which ones are you experiencing right now?”

I scan the display for crawling dread, for utter worthlessness, for total confusion, for intense regret, for rule-hating frustration. “Anger.” She types it into my file. I am now officially institutionalised.



I feel another emotion coming on. “What’s the difference between guilt and shame?” I ask.



“Guilt is just about your behaviour. Shame is about who you are.”

She leads me back to the reception desk, where I see a woman with her arm in a blue fibreglass cast being led out of a nursing station: another new arrival. She has pasty skin, blue-black hair, lots of piercings and the look of a vampire. I’m instantly attracted.

From the other direction, a woman with long blond hair pouring out of a pink baseball cap saunters to the reception desk. I think what I always think, what every man always thinks: what was puberty for if not to think these thoughts?

“What are you here for?” I ask the blonde. Her tag is blue. “Love addiction,” she replies.

Perfect. I ask if she wants to get dinner.

Check-in emotion: guilt. Also, passion.

• This is an edited extract from The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, by Neil Strauss, published on 13 October by Canongate Books at £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com.