If anything in Derek DelGaudio’s appearance and demeanor sets him apart, it’s that little sets him apart. Soft-spoken and presenting a beguiling, open face — one might call it “innocent” — the modern conjurer was unfailingly polite and forthcoming in a recent video interview.

Yet DelGaudio, 36, spent two years scrambling audiences’ expectations, often bringing people to tears, in his Off Broadway show “In & Of Itself,” a feat anybody with a Hulu subscription can now experience via the documentary film of the same name.

The most obviously attention-grabbing part of DelGaudio’s new memoir, “Amoralman” (Knopf), explores his six-month stint as a bust-out dealer (a sleight-of-hand expert hired to secretly favor specific players, i.e. a professional cheat) at an exclusive weekly poker game, when he was in his mid-20s.

It’s a wildly entertaining, thriller-like set piece — yes, there is a gun — though, as with the show, it is shot through with heady existential queries. Plato’s cave, which involves illusion and manipulation, is a driving allegory in the book, which is also undergirded by the cultural thinker Jean Baudrillard’s theories of the relationship between reality and simulation.

“Amoralman” now joins “The Matrix” in proving you can turn French philosophy into compelling entertainment. This places DelGaudio, who also makes up the conceptual duo A. Bandit with the artist Glenn Kaino, at a crossroads between favorites of the museum world like Marina Abramovic and hustlers with such names as Titanic Thompson.

“After seeing the show, I concluded that Derek is not a magician, but not a performance artist either,” Abramovic, who is glimpsed in the Hulu film, wrote in an email. “He is on his own in a category he created himself. In some abstract way he reminds me of Marlon Brando. He establishes trust between the audience and himself, which allows emotions to get in. We are not looking at him; we are together with him.”

Speaking via Zoom from his Manhattan home, DelGaudio explained that the new book is a sort of prequel to “In & Of Itself,” going back to his childhood with a lesbian mother, his discovery of magicians, swindlers and con men, and those nerve-racking poker nights. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

“Amoralman” is subtitled “A True Story and Other Lies,” and it features something we could call a plot twist that upends the reader’s perspective. Did those set off alarm bells with your publisher, considering the fraught history of memoirs taking liberties with facts?

They were very, very uncomfortable. They said, “Have you heard of a book called ‘A Million Little Pieces’?” I hadn’t heard of that story. It’s complicated because I have a background as a magician: You think I’m going to fool you. So I use that to reveal something true that you can’t believe is true because you think that I’m here to deceive you. There’s things in the book that are so fantastical, they either couldn’t possibly be true or they could be. The answer is, they are true. But it’s the artist’s job to present them in a way that’s so fantastical, you can’t possibly believe them.

Most of the time, audience members are just props in magic shows, someone to pick a card, but you go much further. How do you think of your relationship with viewers and readers?

The audience are genuinely part of the equation. Despite what the movie shows, which is a very emotional arc, that was not part of it for me. I never tried to make anyone cry. I never tried to have a reaction. I just wanted to create the gestures, say the things I came to say, and let them interpret it however they want. I think that empathy is weaponized, often, especially by magicians, in a way that is not necessarily healthy or generous.

A major thread in the book is your friendships with male mentors: Walter from the Colorado Springs magic shop; the virtuoso card cheat Ronnie; even Leo from the Hollywood poker games, who treats you like a son. How did they connect with your interest in magic?

I felt I was born with an absence of some sort, and I think that I’ve spent much of my life trying to fill that void. That void was created by external sources: I lived in a world that told me explicitly that I’m supposed to have a father — a mother and a father. I was aware of that need to have a male influence in my life, but then there was also this feeling, a real need, to keep secrets to protect my family. So I found this very interesting world that not only was male-dominated, but it trafficked exclusively in secrets.

Part of the book is about how you had to prove yourself to these guys. How tough was it?

To earn my seat at their table, I had to become better than anything they had ever seen before. I felt like the kid in those samurai movies that sits on the porch for a week before he even gets led into the dojo.

Do you feel the show and “Amoralman” are part of an effort to define yourself?

I’ve been trying to free myself from the burden of secrets and from the burden of feeling so attached to an identity that I adopted early on in life — without even realizing that’s what I was doing — which was of a deceiver, a magician, a trickster. And trying to create work that lives up to Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs, Marina with the tools that I’ve had is very, very difficult. But it’s only difficult because of perception, because of frameworks and contexts — it’s not actually the work, it’s everything around it.

With the show, the film and now the book behind you, it feels as if you’re closing a chapter of your life. What are your plans?

I don’t feel the need to do anything anyone’s seen me do before, and I’m excited to have that discomfort of staring into the abyss of what’s next. Maybe in 20 years I’ll reveal that I’ve been working on a show and didn’t tell you.