To Be Honest

by Michael Leviton

Overview

A memoir about an unusual upbringing in a family fanatically devoted to honesty, and what came next

If you’re like most people, you probably lied today. It may have been a small one, some insignificant falsehood meant to protect someone’s feelings or guard your true thoughts. Now imagine if your parents had raised you to never lie, if they’d ingrained in you a compulsion to never, under any circumstances, withhold the truth or fail to speak your mind. It might be wonderfully freeing. Everyone else might not appreciate it so much.

To Be Honest is Michael Leviton’s extraordinary account of being raised in a family he calls a “little honesty cult.” For young Michael, his parents’ core philosophy felt liberating. He loved “just being honest.” By the time he was twenty-nine years old, Michael had told only three “lies” (by most people’s understanding of the word) in his entire life. But this honesty had consequences—in friendships, on dates, and at job interviews. And when honesty slowly poisoned a great romance, Michael decided there had to be something to lying after all. He set himself the task of learning to be as casually dishonest as the rest of us.

To Be Honest is a tender and darkly comic memoir about what it means and how it feels to tell more than the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419743054
Publisher:	Abrams Press
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	485,237
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Leviton is a writer, musician, photographer, and storyteller. He is the host of the storytelling series and podcast The Tell. He has worked as a screenwriter and contributed music to television shows, including HBO’s Bored to Death.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part 1 Just Being Honest

Chapter 1 Most People 3

Chapter 2 My Miseducation 41

Chapter 3 Teenage Truths 63

Chapter 4 Family Camp 75

Part 2 An Honest Living

Chapter 5 Open Mic 113

Chapter 6 This Is Not Normal 129

Chapter 7 To Know Her Is to Love Her 179

Chapter 8 Uncomfortable Questions 209

Chapter 9 The Polite Way to Say No Is to Say Yes 221

Part 3 The Dishonest Days

Chapter 10 Forbidden Subjects 231

Chapter 11 This Is Normal 253

Chapter 12 The Mercy of Censorship 279

A Postscript on Truth

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/25/2020

Musician and screenwriter Leviton brings great wit and irony to his debut memoir about the pros and cons of being honest, at all costs, all of the time. In his late 30s, after ending a seven-year relationship with Eve, a fellow musician, he recalls his eccentric Southern California upbringing. Leviton’s emotionally distant father told the then-four-year-old Leviton to respect people by “trusting them to handle the truth,” even if it may hurt them. “It made most people want to strangle me,” he writes. In grade school, he accuses a teacher of being a racist after she unjustly punishes a Latino classmate; Leviton also scares away a group of bullies after challenging them to reveal their feelings about themselves. In his early 20s, Leviton moves to New York City, where he meets Eve, his people-pleasing foil. She helps him recognize the traits of his upbringing (“Silence was suffering, confession was connection, and criticism was love,” he writes). Then, convinced that lying will make him and others happier, he becomes lost in untruths, wrestling with the pleasant white lies of small talk, such as saying “I’m fine” when asked “How are you?” He eventually stops lying, realizing that he’s unmoved by “being liked or making people happy,” and vows to “read whether a person wants honesty or not.” Honestly, this thoroughly enjoyable, wry narrative is a winner. (Jan, 2021)

Publishers Weekly

I couldn’t put this book down. Wait—that’s a lie; I had to sleep and stuff. But the truth is that To Be Honest is astonishing, funny (both ha-ha and peculiar), and heartbreakingly touching. Michael Leviton has written such an unflinching look at what it means to tell the truth and to love that you can’t read it without performing an inventory of all the lies you ever told or received, in the name of being human.

author of Approval Junkie - Faith Salie

WTF. That’s all I can say about To Be Honest. I mean. What. The. Fun. To Be Honest reads like a case study in interpersonal horror. I cringed and laughed alternately. Eek. What fun!

Thurber Prize–winning author of The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir - Harrison Scott Key

2020-03-15
An obsessive search for honesty that becomes an emotional minefield.

In this uneven but oddly absorbing book, Leviton unapologetically reveals what raw honesty looks and feels like. The author was raised in a household he dubs “a little honesty cult,” in which he was encouraged by his parents to always tell the truth, no matter how painful or embarrassing the circumstances. “My parents…argued that children are born honest,” he writes, “that we revel in self-expression until parents, teachers, and friends punish or shame our honesty away.” Leviton divides his journey into three distinct parts, starting with the inevitable conflicts he inspired in other schoolchildren and the rather bizarre “family therapy camp” that would result in his parents’ divorce. Armed with a creative spark, a flair for the ukulele, and an arch sense of humor often misunderstood by others, the author landed in New York City trying to find work as a writer. This middle part is poignant but also quite painful to read, as the author describes his experiences in a relationship with the love of his life at the time, a graphic artist who regularly broke up with him. Eventually, Leviton decided that the only way to break the poisonous cycle of truth that handicapped him in many ways was to learn to lie. “My early lies,” he writes, “were simple attempts to misrepresent myself as normal,” merely pieces of his “experimentation with dishonesty.” Add to these experiences some peculiar drama on the side—e.g., Leviton philosophically arguing with an armed mugger or accidentally inspiring an orgy—and readers will get the literary equivalent of a radio program they stumbled across but can’t turn off, albeit with the edited parts left in this time.

A memoir that shows that while truth doesn’t always mean beauty, there’s something to be said for beautiful liars, too.

Kirkus Reviews