Fiction. In an obsessive monologue vaguely after the manner of Thomas Bernhard, a socially inept writer, in an attempt to deflate or defeat the humiliation of seeking to impress the smooth-talking, self-important sorts of people he loathes but envies, tries to get to the bottom of an embarrassing incident from his childhood, with entertaining but refreshingly anti-climactic non- results. In THE QUIDDITY OF DELUSION, both barrels of Nicholls' word-gun are, as always, loaded, and the ego gets it hard in the nads. "Needing social approval from his pompously intellectual inferiors, our hero suffers how to present a self-compromised pseudo version of a traumatic childhood embarrassing incident in a self-failed attempt to 'belong.' Later he tries to research what really happened by traveling to the assumed spot. he interviews the memories of sister & parents who all prove their reactivated mocking indifference to our pathetically verbally self-conscious hero who's an exactitude slave to literary integrity that attempts to pierce the fiction/reality divide to which he's a writerly insider/outsider tumbled by word-beset rectitude. All this wrings humor to its highest note." - Marvin Cohen, author of How to Outthink a Wall, The Self-Devoted Friend, and Others, Including Morstive Sternbump