Instead, he was a gracious, generous and gentle soul. No vitriol, directed at me or elsewhere, was in evidence. I was both relieved and disappointed, like the gullible Weather Channel viewer who girds himself for the Storm of the Century by stocking up on salt, bottled water and other supplies, only to wake up to a mere dusting of snow.

Rakoff warns us in the very title of his book that he is something of a fraud, a cowardly lion whose tough talk hides his fears and insecurities. But then we are all frauds in Rakoff's world, all deserving of both flagellation and forgiveness.

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How has your association with "This American Life" impacted your career?

It didn't just impact my career -- it made my career. It's like being awarded a driver's license without having to learn how to do left turns or parallel parking, just because they want you on the road. That doesn't happen. So I'm incredibly lucky in that way.

You've also dipped your toe in the acting waters from time to time over the years, most recently off-Broadway in David and Amy Sedaris' play "The Book of Liz." How do the two disciplines differ?

They're different sets of muscles. I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.

Is the act of writing about masking oneself, or about revealing oneself in the light you prefer?

That's the thing: It's about revealing oneself on one's own terms and about bullying people. [Laughs] It's interesting -- what's nice about acting is that it's work that involves other people daily. As you know, writing is not. So it's been nice to do this play, which has taken up the last quarter of the year -- we were up for three months. It's great to be with people.

Does reading your work in public satisfy that same performing jones?

Yes, it does, definitely. It might even be a little more substantive because the words are your own.

Nearly every piece in "Fraud" finds you in one way or another an outsider. Do you seek out such situations?

Oh, sure. But I think pretty much everybody feels like an outsider most of the time.

You've a number of traits that might lead some to consider you an outsider: You're gay, you're Jewish and you're an expatriate Canadian. Have you ever felt pressure from any of those communities to be more of an activist, to more avidly embrace your sexuality, your ancestry or your nationality in your work?

Within the world that I run in, which is a very privileged, insular, small New York world, they're so normative, and I'm so much a type, that it's not really an issue. But, simply put, I think it's far more politically significant that Outside magazine allowed me to, unself-consciously and completely without comment, be visibly, notably gay in a feature article I wrote for it ["Back to the Garden," a revised version of which appears in "Fraud"]. It didn't have a problem with that at all, and I don't think anybody noticed. But that seemed significant to me.

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