Investigating ‘The Truman Show delusion’ in real life

Mary Pilon on Olympic sailor and ‘The Truman Show delusion’ sufferer, Kevin Hall

“He loved how deliciously vivid everything felt now that he was in The Show: the music more harmonious, the food more savoury, the breeze more refreshing, even the bark under

his fingertips more crisp and satisfying. In so many ways, it felt as though things couldn’t possibly get any better. Then the cops showed up.” It’s one thing suffering from a bipolar disorder, but it’s another to suffer from

“The Truman Show delusion”, a condition in which you believe you are the star of your own TV show and reality is constructed fiction. But try adding to that, as Kevin Hall did, the fact you are an Olympic and America’s Cup sailor and also, from time to time, on TV for real? No wonder the poor guy got confused. In her new book, The Kevin Show, former New York Times reporter Mary Pilon does an excellent job of describing Hall’s experiences and inhabiting his condition, which often occurred at deeply inopportune moments such as the one above, when

he jumped from a tree hoping to convince a terrified passerby to play Ophelia in what he thought was a new

Shakespearean plotline, or when helping recover the body of his Artemis team-mate, Andrew Simpson, who died

in 2013 on a practice sail in San Francisco Bay. (Hall convinced himself

the death was staged.) All extraordinary, but no laughing matter.

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The Kevin Show (Bloomsbury) is

published on 13 June