Choke

Choke is a novel by the American writer Chuck Palahniuk, published in 2001.

Victor Mancini is a sex addict who attends recovery meetings he has no intention of finishing, and a con man whose method is to nearly die in a restaurant and then accept the gratitude of the person who intervenes. His real problems are the cost of his mother's nursing home and the question of who she actually is, since Ida Mancini spent his childhood moving him between foster families and taking him back. The novel moves between Victor's present, his work at a colonial re-enactment village and his visits to the home, and his past, told through the fragments of memoir his mother left behind. Palahniuk writes it as black comedy, with short chapters and a great deal of medical and historical trivia, and the search for Victor's father turns into a question about whether the story of his own conception is true at all.

The book returns to the territory of the author's first novel: a damaged man explaining himself in short, funny chapters.