The Confession, James E. McGreevey
I guess the following is what he wants to convey:
Living a life as somebody else is not easy, especially if you already succeeded by faking your identity. Once you hide yourself, you become part of the society that creates your pain. Maybe you feel lucky that you are respected because people around you don't know your secret. But even more strongly you feel the shame of choosing the side of those who are discriminating, while your are in fact to be discriminated. If you have to hide/fake your identity to be accepted, you true self is abandoned, both by others and yourself.
Maybe you can be quite successful by staying in the closet. You can lie to everyone, but you cannot lie to yourself. The fear of being rejected forces you to forget your identity. You recognize yourself by looking at your images reflected in other people's eyes. But you know that is just someone else. The longer you hide, the more you forget your true self.
Long time since you built up your lies, you loss the ability to sense how people think about you. Every time you try to convince yourself that they love you, you end up figuring out they love someone else. The fear of no one loving your true self never fades away, since the more love you gained, the more afraid you are to test their love.
At the end, you realize that a true but sad world is better than a happy but fake world. It is better to be hurt by other people than to be hurt by yourself. The part after James came out was amazing. He fell into severe depression even though no single family member or friend of his rejected him. He was quite lucky in a way that his parents were loving and supportive when he came out. However, he could not face himself. It was difficult for him to come back to the real world at age of 47, after so many years of success mixed with fear and shame by pretending to be straight.
It is hard to imaging how much courage it takes to announce "My truth is that I am a gay American" at the age of forty-seven, as such a public figure. Although he was forced to come out by political scandals, I still respect his honesty because of this book. It gives a really good reason to come out before enjoying too much happiness gained by lies.
As a sidenote, the parts talking about politics are pretty boring. Luckily you can easily pick them out by reading the capitalized first sentences at the beginning of each part.