Short Story Spotlight: Honestly, Truthfully by Terry Trueman

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"Honestly, Truthfully" by Terry Trueman. from Make Me Over: Eleven Stories of Transformation. edited by Marilyn Singer. 2005. Dutton Juvenile. ISBN:  9780525474807
"Honestly, Truthfully" by Terry Trueman is a story about a makeover, from a collection of YA stories called Make Me Over. The story’s main character, Kyle, decides that he tells too many lies and begins making himself over into the most truthful guy he can be, meaning he will tell the whole truth to everyone, about everything. In the course of just one day, he tells people exactly how he’s feeling, insists that his teacher use more familiar (and somewhat more disgusting) terms for female anatomy, and tells a girl exactly how her breasts look right in front of her boyfriend. The consequences of this are what a logical person might expect, except for the story’s weird ending.

Trueman’s exploration of complete honesty versus the need for white lies in order to get along in the world is interesting, even if the story is perhaps more sexually charged than I would have preferred. Kyle’s voice is strong, and reminds me a lot of the charming, appealing voice of Gary Paulsen’s Kevin Spencer, who himself is a very good liar. Kyle very accurately represents what I think is a very universal teenage desire for the truth, and his quest for it makes a nice cautionary tale for kids who might be tempted to try their own exercises in brutal, unbridled truth telling.

I don’t think the concept for this story is particularly new, especially since Jim Carrey did that movie in the late 90s about the idea of living without telling any lies, but it is nice to have such a masculine teen point of view represented in the conversation. I’m not sure what the ultimate moral of the story really is, since things take such a dramatically strange turn at the end of it, but the questions Kyle’s behavior raises are enough to get kids thinking about the concept of truth, which is what makes the story succeed, in my opinion.

I borrowed Make Me Over from my local public library. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.