The Cost of Being True

Respect tradition. Protect the family name. And when necessary, distort reality.1965 Columbia, South Carolina. For generations, the True family has lived by these unspoken rules... until sixteen-year-old Lydia arrives at her aunt Cecyl and grandmother Annie’s home with an innocent high school assignment: interview your oldest relative. Prompted by sharp-tongued Cecyl, the family’s black sheep, a decades-long saga unfolds. As Lydia pieces together her family’s hidden past, she confronts the crippling truths of class, connections, and cultural codes that dictate sexual, racial, and economic injustice. The buried breaches of social transgressions - elopement, mental illness, divorce, hidden parentage, false accusations, financial ruin, legal failures, and sexual misconduct - emerge, revealing a generation shaped by shame and silence. Spanning Columbia’s historic neighborhoods and the dream world of Beverly Hills-Hollywood, and set against the upheavals of World War I, the Great Depression, and Prohibition, the intertwined lives of Annie, Thurston, Cecyl, Leland, Justin, T.W., and Lydia illuminate the fragile line between truth and survival in one Southern family. Drawing on firsthand knowledge of the True family’s history, the author brings these hidden stories into the light - to end the shame, to forgive the transgressors, and to understand the ties that bound them.