To Be Honest

A memoir of “great wit and irony” about growing up in a family fanatically devoted to honesty, and navigating what came next (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

If you’re like most people, you probably lied today―maybe to soften a truth, save face, or keep the peace. Michael Leviton grew up in a home where that was unthinkable. In what he calls his family’s “little honesty cult,” he was taught to say exactly what he thought, never withhold a truth, and never pretend. It felt liberating―until the real world pushed back.

By twenty‑nine, Leviton estimates he had told only three lies in his life. But absolute candor came with a cost: awkward job interviews, friendships that couldn’t withstand bluntness, and a love story that began to buckle under the weight of “just being honest.” When the one person who admired his honesty brought that radical approach into their romance, he started to wonder whether kindness sometimes requires a gentler version of the truth―and whether a well‑placed white lie could be an act of care.

To Be Honest is Leviton’s funny, tender, and disarmingly self‑aware memoir about unlearning the absolutism of his childhood and experimenting―often disastrously―with being “as casually dishonest as the rest of us.” Along the way there are family‑therapy camps, ukulele gigs, philosophical showdowns with strangers, and the dawning realization that intimacy depends as much on listening as on confessing.

Celebrated for its crackling wit and emotional clarity, To Be Honest explores how we tell the truth, why we sometimes don’t, and what it really means to respect other people’s realities. Readers drawn to smart, voice‑driven memoirs about family, identity, and the weird art of being human will find themselves laughing, squirming, and―yes―reconsidering their own relationship to honesty.

Michael Leviton is a writer, musician, photographer, and storyteller. He hosts the storytelling series and podcast The Tell, and his work spans screenwriting and composing music for television, including HBO’s Bored to Death. His debut memoir, To Be Honest, chronicles an upbringing devoted to “radical honesty” and the complicated, often funny ways truth plays out in love, work, and friendship; it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.