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Fraud: Essays

david rakoff

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From This American Life alum David Rakoff comes a hilarious collection that single-handedly raises self-deprecation to an art form. Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff clearly demonstrates how he doesn’t belong–nor does he try to.

In his debut collection of essays, Rakoff uses his razor-sharp wit and snarky humor to deliver a barrage of damaging blows that, more often than not, land squarely on his own jaw–hilariously satirizing the writer, not the subject. Joining the wry and the heartfelt, Fraud offers an object lesson in not taking life, or ourselves, too seriously.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2001
Literary awards
lambda literary award, 

This edition

Format
240 pages, Paperback
Published
April 23, 2002 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN
9780767906319
ASIN
0767906314
Language
English

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About the author

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david rakoff

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David Rakoff (November 27, 1964 – August 9, 2012) was an essayist, journalist, and actor. Originally from Canada, Rakoff was a graduate of Columbia University, he obtained dual Canadian-American citizenship in 2003, and resided for much of his life in New York City. His brother Simon is a stand-up comedian.

Rakoff wrote for the New York Times Magazine, Outside, GQ, Vogue and Salon. He was a frequent contributor to the radio program This American Life on Public Radio International.

Rakoff's essays have been collected in the books Fraud and Don't Get Too Comfortable and are largely autobiographical and humorous. He was openly gay, and his writings have been compared to those of essayist and friend David Sedaris. Rakoff was even mistaken for Sedaris once while performing in a storefront window; both authors have written about this incident in their books.

Rakoff was featured in the This American Life episode 305, the holiday show on December 23, 2005, and episode 156, "What Remains", broadcast 21 March 2000. He was the only individual to host in place of Ira Glass a This American Life episode (Episode 248 - "Like It Or Not"). Rakoff made several appearances on the The Daily Show, and voiced the reading part of Thomas Jefferson for Jon Stewart's, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction.

Rakoff's acting roles included the Off-Broadway comedy play, The Book of Liz, authored by friends David and Amy Sedaris, the film Strangers with Candy, also co-written by Amy Sedaris, and a cameo in the film Capote.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
33(33%)
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32(32%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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Half-MagePrince
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Kept forgetting to read this, it wasn't super enthralling. Some stories were funny but in a mildly annoying way. He really overindulges in esoteric, complicated vocabulary at the expense of readers' enjoyment and comprehension.
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Cansancio_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Alternately witty, scathing, insightful and darkly humorous, David Rakoff’s personal essay collections never fail to resonate with me. He is brilliant. I prefer listening to him read his own writings on audio, as his narration style adds so much to the print.
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nocturn246
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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4.5 stars - Spotted this in a nearby Little Free Library recently. Couldn't resist picking it up because I had not read any of David Rakoff's written work and because I knew this also was a Chip Kidd cover design. The best of the essays echoed back to some of the classic episodes from This American Life. The final essay is harder to read because it tells the early first recovery from a disease that ended the author's life in 2012.
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ChiefWarlock
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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some of these essays were great, and some were so-so. I listened to this and felt like his performance was pretty uninspired most of the time. He comes to life when he is voice acting, but unfortunately, there is not enough of that.
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sushiitaco
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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3.5⭐️. Some true laugh out loud moments. Some surprisingly deep thoughts popping out at you here and there between the casual and funny observations. Makes me wonder if I should be writing down more things from my life but I can’t imagine mine is as exciting. I think I would have rated it a bit higher if so many of the references hadn’t become a little dated over the last 20ish years, and if I hadn’t needed a dictionary nearby at times.
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tacoadictt
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I had bought Fraud a couple of years ago and finally made time to read it. I was drawn to it after reading the jacket copy because I, too, often feel as though I don't fit in anywhere and that I don't really belong. Figuring that such a book would benefit me, I went for it.

I don't regret reading it, though as an editor I was disappointed to see so many needlessly long or obscure words as well as massively overlong sentences. I understand that I'm not in my usual role of editing scientific material for readers' understanding, but still I maintain that longer sentences and longer words are harder to read. Writing that uses that approach feels forced to me and smacks of pretentiousness.

But then I'm not in David Rakoff's head, and I chuckled enough times in the book that I don't consider the time wasted. Some of the essays are stronger than others. I confess that I guffawed at his admittedly tasteless and presumably fictitious rendition of a wife whose husband had hit her but then apologized later. You'd have to see it. Domestic abuse is certainly no laughing matter, but 20 years ago maybe he got away with it because the context made it clear that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously.

Even so, I felt as though I found a kindred spirit and have ordered more of his books. I hadn't known that he died until I was midway through this collection, and his final essay about his struggles in chemotherapy was touching.

My fellow editors will appreciate that we can never really stop the meter from running. Oddly, in at least four places, the book uses em dashes when en dashes were clearly called for (all page numbers from the 2001 hardcover first edition):

• "A few weeks into my Psychic Secretary—hood, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters" (p. 34).
• "Things got pretty quiet after Columba, monster sighting—wise, until about 1933, when the first road was built around the Loch" (p. 135).
• "There are those who would say that my fear is an outdated remnant of a pre—Gilded Age New York, and perhaps it is" (p. 155).
• "Unlike certain Steven Seagal—moderated Buddhist retreats and Icelandic piano-teaching, elf-spotting living rooms I could mention, there is none of that falsely benign conception of nature as friendly, inherently good, tame, and prettified" (p. 182).


In any case, I'm looking forward to his other material and seeing how it compares.
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Cyniara
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Rakoff is one of my favorites but I haven't read him in a long time. I can't remember the introductory book I liked the most; these essays utilize his usual acerbic style, and while still humorous, slightly more bitter. His insight, both into himself and his environment, is always illuminating and intelligent and given that these essays were collected around the time he was first diagnosed with cancer which eventually killed him, it's not surprising that his mood was a bit dark.
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failthrowaway
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I love David Rakoff's writing, but reading it is always challenging, knowing that he could still be here today. No one can replace Rakoff for me, though some say David Sedaris is similar. All due respect to Mr. Sedaris, but there's no comparison for me. Rackoff's writing is lyrical and witty to the point of making me angry that I can't come up with the lines that seem so effortless for him. The final essay in the book, which dealt with his battle with Hodgkin's, had a particularly striking effect on me knowing that his cancer would eventually come back and treatment wouldn't be successful. Fraud still had me laughing out loud, specifically these two quotes:
Talking about young girls coming into the ice cream shop to order special edition Annie ice cream - "Seven- and eight-year-old angels would skip into the store, all pigtails and horse love, and the scales would fall from their eyes as they spied the pink and white of the tubs of Annie, seeing them for what they were: blatant marketing; a pernicious inducement to submit to the patriarchy. These apple-cheeked youngsters became suddenly hardened and cynical. They took up smoking right there in line, laughing bitterly like baby Piafs, derisively ordering Futility Shakes and double scoops of Alienation Chip."
And this one, from an essay about a meditation retreat -
"Only one woman asks Seagal what she should do in the face of hate speech. She hears so much of it, primarily against blacks and gays. 'Well, I'm black and gay, and I'm proud of it,' says Seagal. The straight, white audience laughs appreciatively and applauds. Racism eradicated, we move on."
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