A man who died by suicide in his late-twenties working in advertising announces that his entire life he has been a fraud, desiring only to be "admired, approved of, applauded," and sets out to tell the story of his life leading up to his suicide, in an attempt to thoroughly explain his psyche.

He wasn't able to enjoy his high school relationships with girls because he was too preoccupied with the fact of himself being the one to get with them than the moment itself. In his late twenties, before his suicide, he tried psychoanalysis. Throughout the sessions, he confessed to various ways throughout his life in which he believes he was a fraud, doing everything he did to craft a specific impression of him in others' minds. He liked his analyst, Dr. Gustafson, but felt disappointed when Dr. Gustafson interpreted the man's telling him his fears of being a fraud as a success at being genuine; when, in fact, the telling of the fears was yet another way to manipulate Dr. Gustafson's image of him so he would appear likeable and special. The man feels this is evidence Dr. Gustafson isn't smart enough to actually help him but continues to pay money to go to the sessions and manipulate Dr. Gustafson's view of him.

One of the examples the protagonist gives for his fraudulence is how at four, after breaking his parents' expensive bowl, he chose to tell the truth (that he broke the bowl) in a clumsy lie that would make it look like he was covering for his sister, rather than lie outright and say she did it. That way she, not he, would be punished for dishonesty, while he would be praised for honesty, and his parents would feel good about themselves for raising such an honest child. In another example, he stopped playing baseball for love of the sport but rather for obsession with his own success. In another, he volunteered obsessively at church because he wanted others to see him as good and "pretended" to speak in tongues to show the spirit had entered him.

The protagonist "plays dumb" with Dr. Gustafson, even though he thinks he has him figured out. He thinks Dr. Gustafson is a repressed gay man, and that the only honest thing would be to tell him that, but he won't. Dr. Gustafson dies of colon cancer.

The protagonist buys into one of Dr. Gustafson's theories, though: that each day is in service to either love or fear. From this theory and from something hurtful and old ex said to him, the protagonist decides that his incapability to be genuine could be tied to an incapability to love.

He discusses how the last straw in his decision to kill himself was an episode of "Cheers" that made him believe his entire dilemma he believed to be the essence of his self was a cliché. He wrote letters to the people in his life but worried about how, even in the letters, he was thinking about how his suicide would look and crafting them in ways to make them think of him what he wanted them to. He dismisses many of his thoughts before the act as too cliché. In an attempt to eliminate the element of performance from the deed, he crashed his car in a remote location where he wouldn't spend his last moments imagining what people would think watching--yet still he thought about this choice as a performance in of itself, of wanting other people to note how he seemed to not want to make it a performance. He thinks about how cliché things are only moving to the actors involved and his "basic problem" was that he'd, at an early age, "chosen to cast his lot with [his] life's drama's supposed audience instead of with the drama itself."

His car speeding toward a bridge abutment, he imagines everyone in the world is trying to see each other through tiny keyholes in doors. He thinks about the unreality of linear time and how all moments co-exist before death, not in some chronological order.

The protagonist compares different moments in time as if they are the same moment and speaks of how a man named David Wallace (the author's name) finds a yearbook photo of a popular, successful guy from his high school who recently killed himself in a flaming car crash (this guy is implied to be the protagonist) and Wallace's mind swirls with questions and memories and inner thoughts. "Fully aware that the cliché that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid," Wallace fights the voice in his head that mocks his attempt to understand the protagonist's consciousness and firmly sets out to try, with sincerity and authenticity.