Agassi's book reveals lies he 'can't live with'

It turns out Andre Agassi was lying all along.

To fans. To opponents. To tennis authorities. To first wife Brooke Shields. To friends, including Barbra Streisand. To the media. And, he says, to himself.

"I can't live with that anymore," Agassi said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

"These lies

some of them came, certainly, out of fear. A lot of them came out of real confusion. A lot of it was thinking out loud. A lot of it was just getting stuff wrong. And a lot of it started with lies to myself," Agassi said. "When I retired from tennis, I had the opportunity, the time, the energy, to turn a real hard lens on myself."

His book "Open," in stores Monday, allows Agassi to unburden himself of secrets he's carried for years. Secrets about using crystal meth, about evading punishment for a failed drug test, about wearing a hairpiece, about what he calls a long-standing hatred of tennis.

Agassi described the memoir, a compelling read crafted by Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer from tape recordings of the eight-time Grand Slam champion's taped recollections, as part of his "atonement for where I've been in my life."

As he retraces that life in present tense

and without quotation marks, because "this is reconstructed dialogue," as he put it

Agassi sets out to explain himself and describe his journey from ninth-grade dropout to founder of a prep school in Las Vegas. He writes about his courtship of tennis star Steffi Graf, now his wife and the mother of their two children.

Along the way, he offers critical words for rivals such as Pete Sampras, Michael Chang and Boris Becker; discusses "tanking" matches; and poignantly describes his childhood fear of his father ("shrill and stern and filled with rage"), who Agassi told the AP refused to read the book.

Agassi recounts how, when he was a kid, his father would give him Excedrin before matches because it contained caffeine. Once, Agassi writes, his father gave him what Agassi believes to be speed. He also writes at various points about using marijuana and alcohol. Speaking to the AP, Agassi called crystal meth "a performance inhibitor" and said, "Everything I earned on the tennis court, I actually had to probably earn more than I needed to, because of many of the things I did to myself."

Asked whether he ever took performance-enhancing substances as a professional, Agassi

who retired in 2006

replied, with a light chuckle, "No. No. The answer is 'No.'"