To Be Honest Page 26

  The sound booth was just as spare and gray as the rest of the office. Ira and I sat across a table with microphones between us. “Can you explain a bit about your upbringing?” Ira asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “My parents taught us to be honest.”

  “But that’s normal in a lot of situations, isn’t it?” Ira said. “Not usually bad advice.”

  “I suspect we have very different definitions of honesty,” I said. “Most parents teach their kids to be polite, to hide their thoughts and feelings. Barely anyone really wants their kids to be honest. As soon as their kids are actually honest for a moment, they freak out and punish them.” Ira didn’t seem convinced. I became paranoid that he was pretending not to understand to rile me. If that was his goal, it was working. “Look,” I told him. “Barely anyone is honest like us. My parents worked out their divorce in front of us in therapy sessions.”

  Ira recoiled in what appeared to me to be genuine horror. “Hold on,” Ira said. “What do you mean?”

  Because we were discussing honesty, I felt invited to be 100 percent authentic. I told Ira honesty stories as he gawked, disturbed. I tried to explain why it felt good to express myself, why it felt awful to stay quiet, why I wanted to feel known and to know those around me. Ira responded, “I feel like when you tell some of these stories, you’re like somebody from another planet or something who got dropped into our world.”

  After being interviewed in the little gray booth for what felt like much longer than the half hour I’d been told we’d talk, Ira stopped the conversation and we left the booth. The clock outside said we’d been in the booth over two hours.

  “Do you think your family would talk to me?” Ira asked.

  I laughed. “My family will tell anything to anyone.” Ira smiled, probably assuming I was exaggerating.

  “Okay,” Ira said. “Let’s plan interviews with them this week and have you come back for another three hours or so too.”

  I called my family, one at a time, to ask if they wanted to be interviewed by Ira Glass about honesty. My mom and brother had no concern about being interviewed, but Dad sounded nervous.

  When I called Miriam, she asked, “Are they gonna make us look like assholes?”

  “It’s hard to stop us from looking like assholes,” I told her.

  “So many of the stories about Dad make him look horrible,” she said.

  “Well, we don’t have to tell the worst ones. But even if we don’t, you know who will?”

  Miriam sighed. “Dad.”

  She went into the office that week to be interviewed and called me when she got out. “It was weird,” Miriam said. “He asked me if you were exaggerating and I told him I didn’t have your experience, that I wasn’t too honest. He said, ‘So if someone asked if they looked fat in this dress, you’d just tell them they looked great?’ And I told him I’d be honest if they asked. He acted like that was crazy. Then he kept asking me what I’d do in different scenarios and acted like every answer was nuts. Maybe I am too honest?”

  Mom said her interview was fun, but that she found it confusing that Ira didn’t value honesty. “He thought everything we did was rude or mean.”

  Ira planned his interview with Dad back-to-back with my second interview, so when I returned to the offices of This American Life, I waited anxiously outside the booth while Ira finished talking with Dad remotely from California. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I could see Ira through the sound-booth window in his headphones, wincing.

  Ira shuffled out of the booth, pinching the frames of his glasses. “Wow,” Ira said. “Your dad … wow.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “What happened?”

  Ira led me into a cramped space by a window between interns on computers. He ducked his gaze as if the conversation with my dad had made it hard for him to look at me. The section of the room where we stood was not ideal for conversation, but Ira showed no indication that he wanted to move. “Usually you have to get things out of people, you know?” Ira kneaded the back of his neck. “I just asked him if he had any regrets about how he raised his kids and he launched into telling me such awful stuff.”

  I laughed, which maybe wasn’t the appropriate response. “That sounds like him. What did he tell you?”

  Ira shook his head. “Ummm, I don’t think it’s appropriate to …” He was too thrown off to go into detail. Ira pulled himself together. “He just admitted it so quickly, it was like he was proud. But how could you be proud of these things?”

  “No,” I corrected. “In my family, we talk about things we aren’t proud of. It’s cathartic.”

  “But he said this stuff on the radio. On record. Obviously, we wouldn’t use almost any of it. It could ruin his life. Why would he risk that?”

  “We like the truth,” I told him.

  He gazed off blankly, like that response didn’t clear up anything. Ira repeated the question, oddly fixated. “Why would he admit those things on the radio? Why would he admit them to anyone?” I eyed the booth, aware that we could be having this discussion as part of the episode. “Michael, I have to admit,” Ira said, gazing vacantly out the office window. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Should we have this conversation in the booth?” I asked.

  Ira awoke from his haze. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, good thinking.”

  A while later, with the microphone between us, Ira paused, deciding whether to censor himself. “When I was a teenager, I figured out I could get people to like me by asking questions,” he said. “I had social anxiety. I consciously decided to avoid talking about myself and just ask questions. And it worked. I had friends and I barely spoke. I just asked about their feelings. I interviewed them. Make whatever connection you want to my life now.” Ira wagged his head ruefully. “People would feel close to me but I’d feel nothing.”

  I had a vision of the finished episode climaxing with this monologue, Ira’s confession that This American Life was his way to avoid showing his feelings. In the face of my family’s honesty, even Ira Glass’s facade had dissolved, and the emotional breakthrough had been recorded.

  I called Dad after I left the booth and asked him what he thought of his interview. “Ira’s such a brilliant interviewer,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the stuff he got out of me.”

  When the episode’s release approached, Ira wouldn’t play it for us in advance or tell us what exactly was in it. He kept assuring me the episode wouldn’t include anything controversial, that I’d be “likable” and “relatable.” His repetition of this claim made me suspicious; I’d internalized the rule of opposites.

  When it aired, the episode included a moment when Dad said he had regrets about telling us too much. This was the first I’d heard about it. But Ira didn’t include any specifics about what Dad regretted. As the episode continued, it occurred to me that was the only way to keep us likable. Regret was relatable, but what he regretted might not be. Ira had managed to frame us as charmingly naive and idealistic by including only the safest, cutest parts of the story. Ira had sculpted our lives into something positive, mercifully protecting us from ourselves. It wasn’t exactly true, but it was kind.

  My friends who heard the episode were surprised at its tameness. I’d tell them, “The episode about whether to omit unpleasant truths to be likable omitted unpleasant truths to keep us likable.”*

  I told an acquaintance in radio who had worked with Ira the story of the confessional monologue that hadn’t been included. She laughed. “Oh, Ira gives speeches like that in every interview. It gets people to trust him. I’m pretty sure what he said to you is in his one-man show. He might have recited it from memory.” I couldn’t believe that my favorite part of the experience had been a manipulation. This acquaintance assured me that Ira’s sentiment was genuine; the only misleading part was the implication that I’d inspired it.

  I found this information surprisingly devastating. Ira had recognized what I wanted to hear: that my honesty could transform him. He
saw who I wanted to be and reflected the vision back to me. Perhaps this is what it felt like to have tea with Chekhov.

  The Leviton Honesty Scale

  After the episode, Miriam became more open to indirectness. Only a year after the episode aired, she had a new serious boyfriend. Two years later, they got engaged. Now, they’re married.

  After being locked out of jobs in government, Josh switched careers and found lucrative work doing freelance mold-inspections. “This is much better,” he tells me. “I can choose my own hours, work as much as I want. I don’t have to lie to anyone or do anything I think is wrong. I’m free.”

  Mom also wasn’t inspired to be any less honest. “As I get older, I just have less and less patience for people who won’t accept me as I am.” She told me recently that she wanted to start announcing on first dates that she’s a unicorn. “If they can’t handle that I’m a unique, special person, I’d rather know immediately.” Though Mom’s attitude makes me worry about her making the same mistakes I used to make, I hope it’s empowering for her. Maybe she’s still figuring out how to stop drinking sour milk.

  Once my friends were more aware of my honest past, I found that they were quicker to open up to me. Friends who had trouble with confrontation asked my advice about it. Many told me I’d inspired them to be honest with someone they cared about. Nobody seemed to regret it.

  A performance venue in Brooklyn invited me to put on events, so I tried my own take on a storytelling series. I called it The Tell, named after the poker term for little mannerisms that “tell” the other players what cards they’re holding. The series was a perfect excuse to get interesting people to tell me personal stories, even more effective than carrying around a tape recorder.

  A year into The Tell, a friend of mine got onstage to tell a devastating story about her first love’s schizophrenia and hospitalization. She told the whole thing on the verge of tears. Her raw voice and the sniffling audience felt familiar. During the intermission, I found Miriam in the audience and said, “During that last story, I realized—”

  Miriam interrupted, “—that The Tell is your recreation of family camp?”

  “Yeah!” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice before.”

  Over time, I slowly let myself slip back more and more into honesty. But, having experienced dishonesty for a while had softened me. Honesty itself hadn’t really been the problem. I’d just needed to empathize with whoever I was being honest with, to be honest not automatically, but because I cared.

  I still followed one rule:

  — Read whether a person wants honesty or not.

  If they preferred indirectness or small talk or positivity, I’d try to give it to them. I’d only be honest with those who wanted it.

  In a crowded bar, drunkenly shouting over the music and general noise, I talked to my friend Laura about how I might write about my relationship to honesty. Her blonde hair fell messily over her face and her elbows perched on the table, her chin in her hands.

  I told her, “On the Leviton honesty scale of one to ten, the This American Life episode was a two or three. If I wrote a five or six, I’d still be perceived as really honest but with a chance of some people still liking me.”

  Laura closed one of her hazy blue eyes and looked at me hard with the other. She slurred, “People who do great things don’t think about what will make everybody like them.”

  “I’m pretty sure they do,” I said. “Whether consciously or not.” Laura laughed uncomfortably. I asked, “Do you really think I should write a book at honesty-level ten?”

  “Why not?” Laura said. “You’re seriously gonna write a book about honesty and not be honest?”

  “The thing is,” I told her, “everyone prefers the more likable version as long as I don’t mention that it’s the more likable version.”

  “I’d rather read something true that I hate than something fake that I love.”

  “No way,” I said. “If you read two books, one that made you hate the author and the other that made you like the author, you’d prefer the likable one. You’d probably even mistakenly see it as more authentic. And second of all, let’s say you’re right and the book would be better if it made everybody hate me. How does that benefit anyone?”

  Laura snapped, “Because there’d be more truth in the world! Everybody’s people-pleasing enough as it is.”

  “Let me ask,” I said. “How honest are you?”

  Laura gazed into her empty glass as if the ice would show her reflection. Her straw almost went up her nose. “I should be more honest,” she said. “It’s hard for me.” Laura cradled her cheeks in her hands again. “It’s different for you. You’re capable of it.”

  “Anybody can be honest,” I said. “Just move your mouth and your tongue and the words come out.”

  “No,” Laura said. She cocked her head and ran her fingers over the table’s wood. “Trust me. You don’t know. We can’t.” She looked up at me, her eyes watery. “That’s why you have to tell the truth. You have to be honest for the rest of us.”

  When Dad next visited New York, we got dinner at a small Italian restaurant that felt like it hadn’t changed since the 1970s. He told me, “I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff I used to do. Like writing negative music reviews? I used to go to a concert full of screaming fans and write a review about how the band sucked and all these happy people were wrong. What was the point of that?” Dad laughed at himself, which I was seeing him do more and more. “When Josh wanted to throw the chess pieces around, why didn’t I just make that the game? We could’ve just thrown chess pieces and had a great time.”

  He told me about an office reunion some former co-workers had organized, a gathering of people he hadn’t seen in ten years. He told his old associates, “I’m getting the sense working with me was a nightmare. How bad was I?” Everyone took turns telling stories about awful things he’d said, about how scared of him they were. “You’re very different now,” one told him. Dad seemed proud of that.

  Soon we were reminiscing about the ridiculous things he used to say. I told him, “Remember how when you expressed an opinion and someone got upset, you’d say, ‘What’s the big deal? Who cares what I think anyway?’ I used to say it too. We’d insult someone and then insult them again for caring.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dad said, shaking his head. “Like, ‘I think you’re an idiot, but who cares what I think?’” Dad scratched his beard and I noticed now he looked into my eyes when he spoke to me. “Lately, I’ve just been feeling like if there’s no reason someone should care what I think, maybe that means I should just shut up and listen to somebody else for once.” Dad asked me, “So, can you explain some other things that I never understood?”

  He asked me questions in the emptying restaurant and I answered, telling him stories from his past. He’d been present for all of them, but it was like he’d never heard them. I was telling him his own history. And this time, he believed me.

  Eve and I still spoke every once in a while, though I saw her rarely. She married her boyfriend and they built a house together. Last year, nearly nine years after our breakup, she visited New York while pregnant with her first child. She asked me to walk around the city with her—not my idea of what an enormously pregnant woman would want to do, but she insisted. So we walked from the Flatiron through the West Village, catching up. We talked over the street noise about the This American Life episode and my plan to write about my “tragic love affair with honesty,” which would involve writing about my tragic love affair with her.

  “Oh, you can write whatever you want about me,” she said. “I’m writing stuff about you too.”

  “What are you writing about me?” I asked. She laughed and avoided the question and I let her.

  We talked about how honest I should be when writing about honesty. “If I’m too honest,” I said, “the book itself will be evidence that I’ve learned nothing. I should probably use Ira’s method, focus on being likable and omit the par
ts that could be off-putting.”

  “Come on!” Eve said, laughing. “That’s no fun! Tell the truth!” Eve smiled at me the way she used to. “It’s like our song, ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,’” she said. “Let them know you.”

  So I did.

  * Years later, the host of the Tape podcast interviewed Ira and brought up my episode. The host explained to Ira that he’d met me in real life somewhere and disliked me; because he’d liked me so much more in the episode than in real life, he felt Ira must have intentionally portrayed me as more likable than I really was. Ira replied, “I liked him. My heart went out to him and I enjoyed talking to him.” But Ira did admit, “We consciously made him likable.” Pressed further to discuss whether he misrepresented his interview subjects as better than they were, Ira said he didn’t. “I’m trying to get across my accurate sense of who the person is.”

  A Postscript on Truth

  In this book, I’ve changed or omitted all names and, in some cases, altered details or descriptions to obscure identities. Some featured in this book asked me specifically to do so. Others portrayed don’t know the book exists, and I’m guessing they’d rather not relive their uncomfortable date or conversation as a bit part in the story of some random idiot they’d forgotten. I suspect they’d rather not find out how their offhand remarks might have ruddered my life’s direction. Surely those depicted were already tortured enough in our original interactions.

  I will now stop explaining because, for all I know, most of you think obscuring identities was the obvious right thing to do and I’m the only one having a neurotic episode. If you feel that I should’ve used real names and outed everyone, you can be comforted by the fact that deep down in my brutally honest heart, I agree with you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I don’t know how I would’ve survived the honest days without Linda Silverman, Matthew Gleeson, Noa Piper, Clancy Cox, Geoff Rickley, everybody from CTY, Lyron Millstein, Emmett Kelly, Lewis Pesacov, Ariel Rechtshaid, Alan Loayza, Chris Cooley, the Hausz family, Tim Wright, Edna Togba, Meital Hadad, Tom Drury, Kevin Cornish, Noah Weiss, Matt Bauder, Greg Rogove, Devery Doleman, Chris Calhoun, Elizabeth Ward, Lach, Regina Spektor, John Sopkia, Jonathan Benedict, Dashan Coram, Lippe, the Babyskins, the Trachtenburg family, Nellie McKay, Margaret Miller, the Hayes family, Kaia Fischer, They Might Be Giants, Jack McFadden, Sharon Van Etten, Myisha Battle, Rob Bryn, Cristina Black, Shruti Ganguly, Vicky Stanton, Victor Magro, Kate Urcioli, Alex Steele, my ukulele students and writing students, everybody from family camp, and my family.