THERE was once a man named Style. He was, according to the 2.5 million-selling book, The Game, voted the most successful pick-up artist in 2003: the best at the art of seducing women and getting them to have sex with him. He was also the alter ego of The Game's author, one-time nerd and former AFC (pick-up lingo for “average frustrated chump”), Neil Strauss.

Style was the star in Strauss’s entertaining reportage on his submersion into the colourful but disturbingly misogynistic pick-up scene. Then two years ago, Strauss laid Style to rest. He buried him at Los Angeles' Hollywood Forever cemetery, in a plot not far from the graves of Fay Wray and Jayne Mansfield. He put Style’s clothes in a casket: the flashy jacket, the hat, the platform shoes, all the props of a life of pick-up artistry. Funeral guests were invited to threw into the box scraps of paper on which Style had collected phone numbers of women he had seduced. A priest officiated.

This was, of course, only a symbolic funeral ceremony. It was about Strauss moving on. And he really was. This was his bachelor party. He was getting married.

Neil Strauss presents himself as a reformed character. But can this really be credible? A decade ago he was peddling techniques he had learned in the pick-up world – many of which seem, in this ge of increasing emphasis on positive sexual consent, extremely troubling. Now, in his latest book The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, he’s telling the story of how, through rehab and therapy, he got over his sex addiction and found intimacy and a fulfilling relationship with former model Ingrid De La O.

The book's introduction begins: “Ingrid, If this is you, really, don’t read this.” Suffice to say, De La O did read the book. Reader, she married him, and they had a baby together. She even contributed some of her diary entries to the narrative. Her reading it, he says, “was probably one of the best things that happened to our relationship. Obviously it was a shock at first to know all the horrible thoughts in my head and terrible things I’d done, but in the end she felt she knew everything and it made her feel much safer.”

The Truth is a memoir that, like its predecessor, The Game, vividly depicts a seedy and often excruciatingly entertaining world – only this time Strauss’s focus is sex addiction therapy: particularly the rehab he was pushed into after De La O discovered he had slept with her close friend.

Like The Game, The Truth delivers a line-up of real-life characters and razor-sharp caricatures, from Strauss's fellow sex addicts to the therapists he meets along the way, to the women he encounters in his experiments with polyamory, switch clubs, free sex and other alternatives to monogamy. The Truth is being sold as a book that questions commitment, marketed with lines like: “Do you believe in monogamy? Neil Strauss didn’t” and – “Is it natural to be faithful to one person for life?”

But actually this book is less about sex than it is about therapy, and the way, as it were, “they f*** you up, your mum and dad”. What does Strauss hope people will take from it? “I want them to be moved and entertained, to laugh and enjoy the story.” He also hopes readers will gain “a little more understanding about themselves and maybe see the way these patterns play out in their own lives”.

Orgies and pick-ups are no longer the order of the day for Strauss. Rather it’s nappy changing and night-time feeds. When we talk, he's just finished putting his son down in his crib in their villa in Malibu. He tells me that while watching the seven-month-old laughing and smiling up at him, he'd thought: “Whatever I got from sex was just a little high. The lasting sense of happiness I have from my son and Ingrid is so much bigger and permanent and more solid, I just wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Before the birth, Strauss wrote a letter to his son, and put it in the post for him to read when he’s older. It said that his parents really loved each other, that he was very much wanted and born “out of love”.

None of this quite tallies with the pick-up artist once known as Style. But burying Style was an important part of this journey. “Most guys getting married have a bachelor party,” says Strauss. "They go to Las Vegas and get a bunch of strippers. What’s the message? That this is my last chance to have fun before my marriage and I want to do things before my wedding that I can’t tell my wife about. It’s a horrible way to begin a relationship.” Strauss preferred to do something that showed he was “moving on from that old life”.

The subject of The Truth is how he moved on – and how, as a route to happiness, his involvement with pick-up artistry was entirely misguided. Of course, it made his fortune, allowed him to date beautiful models, turned him into the go-to expert for seminars on how to pull. On one level, he still feels good about the book, which he considers “true to who I was at the time”. But, he says: “I could never write it now. I’d be embarrassed to read it now.” Recently, he tried to imagine what the person he is now would think of it, if he hadn’t written it himself. “I’d still love the book,” he says, “but the pick-up culture is really even more problematic than I thought it was when I wrote it.”

The Game seems almost like a burden he is attempting to shake off. Not all that easy, given surely he must shoulder a certain amount of guilt? The book was after all responsible for delivering the pick-up artist's manipulative techniques to the wider world of men. It became the go-to guide for a generation of nerdy guys who couldn’t get laid; effectively, it was the shop-front for a whole pick-up artist (PUA) culture of courses, online communities and forums. Yet, the techniques and attitudes described in The Game were frequently dehumanising and often misogynistic. Take the “neg” – an insult whose purpose is, according to The Game, “to lower a woman’s self-esteem”, thereby making the PUA’s “target” more vulnerable.

Strauss’s own critique of it is about as damning as it gets. “I see how much I lost myself and how I thought that I would heal my insecurity with the bodies of other people. It’s embarrassing. But I had to go through The Game to get to the truth of where I am at now. I think the good side of The Game is that it really gave me the faith to create change. The downside is that it was done through manipulation and objectification and using other people.”

The journey was not a good one. “I got so obsessed because I had a hole in myself.”

Yet, on some level, strangely enough, Strauss considers himself a feminist. Even while immersed in PUA culture, he always believed, he says, in equality. “I remember doing interviews after The Game with some feminist writers and I think I always felt I related to them,” he recalls.

Hard to believe, given as Hadley Freeman once put it in The Guardian: "The popularity of PUAs is a backlash against feminism that rapidly becomes one of the more puerile strains of misogyny". Does Strauss see pick-up artistry as misogynistic? “Certainly by the very nature that it is dependent on an outcome that involves objectifying and manipulating other people, it’s inherently disturbing.” But he insists The Game was never intended as an advocacy of the lifestyle. “It was just a journalist who went into that culture and really got lost and I tried to show the positives and negatives of it. People can make their own choices.”

Even when he first started researching the book, Strauss was aware of the dodgy aspects of PUA culture – so much so he planned on writing it under another name. But then, as he immersed himself, he started to feel that “there were bad guys and good guys and that the good guys are lonely, nerdy guys who maybe just want a girlfriend, but don’t know how to do it”. He aligned himself with the latter, he says. But now he thinks their involvement might just be “different shades of not positive stuff”.

So, doesn't it matter to him that the book is a key inspiration to an online culture of PUA forums too often populated with women-hating trolls? Does he worry that some men are still using The Game as a guide and route into the lifestyle? “I suppose,” he says, “any book, whether it’s the Bible or whatever, will be used as justification for negative and positive behaviours.”

The Truth goes some way to countering the culture The Game arguably promoted. It looks like an attempt at redemption. But also, on some level, Strauss is just selling another one of his stories. If he is an artist of anything, it’s of articulating his own inadequacies and melding them into uplifting transformation tales.

With The Game, he told the story of how he – a dweebish guy who missed out on his one potential teenage sexual experience (a blowjob, offered over the phone by a girl) because he was grounded – overcame his poor social skills to become a slick Casanova. With The Truth, he gets to the heart of his problems with intimacy and his inability to commit, and finds the bigger satisfactions of love. “I think if you can fix the stuff that’s inside,” he says, “the stuff outside will come to you, and if it doesn’t you’re not going to be upset about it. I think that’s the difference between The Game and The Truth. The Game was trying to get the truth from the outside in, and The Truth was trying to get the truth from the inside out.”

The book introduces a string of sex addicts and therapists. There’s the room-mate who greets Strauss in rehab, saying: “I’m here for the same reasons you are, the same reason every guy is: I got caught.” There’s Gail, the stern sex therapist who constantly tells rehab clients they have “dehumanised” women, and orders them to wear badges saying “male only” and not to speak to any women at the clinic. But The Truth is “uncomfortable” not because of the orgy and sexual fantasies it features, or the fact Strauss has sex with Ingrid’s friend, but because of what Strauss writes about his parents: the story he tells of a father who was an amputee fetishist and a mother who was a narcissistic “enmesher” who made him his confidant, blocked friendships, grounded him, and generally controlled him. This is a tale of how he decided that his sex addiction, fear of emotional smothering and inability to commit resulted from his upbringing. A key dramatic moment is when a therapist asks Strauss: “Was she [his mother] there for you … or were you there for her?”

Strauss’s parents have not read the book – as far as he knows. And one can’t help thinking that it’s probably best they never do. Though Strauss talks a lot about not blaming, just laying it all out there can seem very like a kind of blame. He notes that his relationship with his parents has not been enhanced by the process of therapy or writing the book. He does say, that a "cordial, distant" relationship is "probably the best for my marriage”.

Meanwhile, The Truth is also an exploration of whether it’s natural for men to be monogamous. Strauss originally set out wanting to call the book The Male Dilemma and to examine how for men, “committing to a monogamous life doesn’t make evolutionary or scientific sense”. He outlines this dilemma in the book: “1. Sex is great. 2. Relationships are great. 3. Relationships grow over time. 4. The sex gets old over time. 5. So does she. 6. Thus the problem.” Indeed, the book is full of graphic, almost deliberately cringeworthy lines like: “Am I even a sex addict? I’m a f***ing man. Men like to have sex. That’s what we do. Put a beautiful woman in a tight dress in a bar on a Saturday night, and it’s like throwing raw meat into a den of wolves.”

What did he learn? That “you shouldn’t have to use evolution or science to justify behaviour. If you have to justify it through that, it’s probably wrong”.

Of course readers of The Game still come to him, and to his self-improvement courses. And, perhaps unable to resist the fact that Style remains a money-spinner, Strauss still offers "the most comprehensive, all-encompassing full immersive seduction program you'll ever experience" through his StyleLife academy. Nowadays, however, he says his workshops have changed a little. “They might come in because they’re interested in The Game, but we do trauma emotional healing. Last weekend, I had six people over and a trauma-healing therapist who I work with and instead of learning what lines to use to meet with women, they got in touch with the pain they had inside from having abusive fathers or narcissistic mothers or what have you.”

So, which self-improving personal journey will he chart next in all its excruciating detail? Will the next book be about how becoming a father made him face his deepest insecurities, and, how changing nappies ultimately transformed him into a higher being? “What? Like maybe a book with the title Gameboy,” he says, “about a player raising a child? No. I think I would only write a book on parenting or fatherhood if I felt I had something new to say that hadn’t been said before. And I’m not there yet.”

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships is published by Canongate. Neil Strauss will be talking at Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow on October 30 at 7pm.