The Lie About the Truck by Sallie Tisdale

The Lie About the Truck

by Sallie Tisdale

The author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women) to this insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America.

What is the truth?

In a world of fake news and rampant conspiracy theories, the nature of truth has increasingly blurry borders. In this clever and timely cultural commentary, award-winning author Sallie Tisdale tackles this issue by framing it in a familiar way—reality TV, particularly the long-running CBS show Survivor.

With humor and in-depth superfan analysis, Tisdale explores the distinction between suspended disbelief and true authenticity both in how we watch shows like Survivor, and in how we perceive the world around us. With her “bold and wise, galvanizing and grounding” (Chloe Caldwell, author of I’ll Tell You in Person) writing, Tisdale has created an unputdownable, thoroughly entertaining, and groundbreaking book that we will be talking about for years to come.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

4 of 5 stars

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Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Lie About the Truck is an unflinching examination of reality TV and the nature of objective truth by Sallie Tisdale. Released 26th Oct 2021 by Simon & Schuster on their Gallery imprint, it's 251 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

The media, the objectivity of truth vs. perception, conspiracy theories, and the nature of reality are very much hot-button topics in our collective cultural consciousness. Up should mean up, blue should be blue, right and wrong, truth, and justice should be objectively simple concepts on which we all agree. Clearly something is amiss when people can see the same information and come to strongly held diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive conclusions.

So, this book is about Survivor and reality TV, but it's also about the nature of experience and objectivity and perception and what, exactly, is quality, and what is crap and why we feel about them the ways we do. The writing is full of vignettes about the shows (generally including specific season and episode information, so readers can go look up what the author's talking about) and stories about the individual contestants, creators, and behind the scenes info. Accompanying the stories are ruminations and drawn parallels to society and life in general.

Four stars. Overall the author manages to make some salient points and her writing is, as always, worthwhile and interesting.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 24 March, 2022: Finished reading
  • 24 March, 2022: Reviewed