The Guardian: 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.
