There's a new profile in Forbes about fratire party boy Tucker Max that brings a somewhat out-of-the-blue revelation: after two million books sold, a feature film (albeit a crappy one) and presumably thousands of women bedded, Tucker Max is retiring from the game. After the upcoming release of his third book, Hilarity Ensues, he'll retire the macho writing shtick he's made his fortune on for over a decade. Even more, he's going to retire that part of his personality altogether, and instead work on maturing into the middle age he's slowly approaching. Tucker Max is 35, which is probably older than your dad was when he had you. All manchildren must grow up sometime, it seems.

You can doubt his newfound awareness as some kind of marketing scheme, but the profile is fairly transparent: writer Michael Ellsberg calls Max out on his behavior and Max, for the most part, is emotionally forthright. “I know some of the stuff I did is, um, beyond the pale or fuck-up sometimes, or mean to other people or destructive to myself," he says. "But I still did it anyway. I understood intellectually in my twenties that this had something to do with unresolved parental, emotional issues. But I didn’t process it.  I could look at other people and see these kinds of issues playing out in them, but I didn’t apply it to myself, because that’s the hardest thing to do for anybody. I couldn’t do that then." Sure, it's narcissistic in another way to play this change of personality out on a public stage, but eh. It still takes a lot of mustard to admit that your entire career and persona has been built on bravado bullshit, especially considering his popularity hasn't completely recessed. (Ellsburg notes his first major book sold 1.6 million copies; his second, 400,000.)

The profile goes into Max's troubled family history, his newfound desire for a long-time partner and his recent dabbles with Freudian psychoanalysis, among other topics. It's not unlike reading a born-again Christian apologize for his wicked ways -- except Max is just trying to downgrade from "insane" to "relatively normal." “Listen I’m 35 now, I can look back on my writing and I can say this," he says. "This is something I’ve never really said before in public or admitted on the record, and I’ll admit it now: I didn’t realize this when I was writing it, but I think if you read between the lines a little bit, in between all the bravado, you can see a lot of self-loathing.” It's easy to laugh, since Max has spent most of his professional career being an unrepentant cock (his clashes with Gawker are legendary, sort of). Can tigers change their stripes, drivers their engines, playboys their condoms? I guess we'll find out; I mean, he wrote a movie (trailer below) about how much of a righteous awesome jerk he was. It might not take right away.