It is magic because it is narratively transportive, a book that sweeps the reader up into the world being created, pages crammed with vivid storytelling. This book is magic in multiple senses of the word. It’s a story of truth that is unafraid of untruth, which might sound contradictory, but when you delve into DelGaudio’s words, it makes perfect sense. It just means that the autobiographical explorations that really dig into a person’s identity are vanishingly rare.ĭerek DelGaudio’s “AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies” is such a rarity, a work of thoughtful, honest self-awareness that isn’t quite like anything I’d ever read before. That’s not a judgment – it’s tough enough to tell the story of your truth to yourself, let alone to the world. Too often, memoirs trend toward the lip service side of things. One can pay lip service to the notion of self-examination, but the actual doing is hard. Looking within ourselves and asking questions about who we are is a challenge that the vast majority of us are unable (or unwilling) to face. It is ultimately a book about the lies we tell ourselves and the realities we manufacture in others. And once he finds himself working as a crooked dealer in a big-money Hollywood card game, Derek begins to question his own sense of morality, and discovers that even a master of deception can find himself trapped inside an illusion.Īmoralman is a wildly engaging exploration of the fictions we live as truths. As stories are peeled away and artifices are revealed, Derek examines the mystery behind his father's vanishing act, the secret he inherited from his mother, the obsession he developed with sleight-of-hand that shaped his future, and the affinity he felt for the professional swindlers who taught him how to deceive others. Using his youthful notebook entries as a road map, Derek embarks on a soulful, often funny, sometimes dark journey, retracing the path that led him to a world populated by charlatans, card cheats, and con artists. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront-and try to understand-his role in a significant act of deception from his past. But who's flipping it? A thought-provoking and brilliantly entertaining work of non-fiction from one of the world's leading deceivers, the creator and star of the astonishing theater show and forthcoming film In & Of Itself.ĭerek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. Truth and lies are two sides of the same coin.
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