From the novel’s opening paragraph to its last lines, the characters’ differing viewpoints battle for domination regarding whose version of the truth is more credible.  After writing her newest novel, Yolanda’s sisters and mother are angry at her because even though the book is fiction, they see themselves in the characters, becoming “fictional fodder” as one of her sisters puts it (7). Yolanda’s family is angry at her because in her book, she writes her version of the truth and this does not match with her family’s version.  Her mother states, “I want my equal time.  I want my chance to tell the world how she’s always lied like the truth is just something you make up.  Remember the time she ran away to the Carmelite convent and told them she was an orphan?” (12).   Mami believes her version is just as valids as Yo’s.  Ironically, Mami’s memory of the Carmelite story does not match that of her daughters.

Her daughters remember how Mami used to “pile us in the car as kids and drive over to the Carmelite nuns and say she was going to leave us in the convent unless we’d promise to behave?  Remember?  We’d be kneeling by the car and all these Carmelite nuns, who weren’t supposed to show their faces, were at the windows wondering what the hell was going on!” (4).  The story changes depending on who is recounting the incident.  Furthermore, in the daughters’ version, Mami is the cruel one, threatening her children with abandonment if they do not behave, while in Mami’s version, Yolanda is the one about the disgrace the family name.  And caught between these two versions, Fifi shakes her “head, no, no, because I don’t know what to believe anymore except that everyone in our family is lying” (13).  This may be a bit dramatic to call everyone a liar, but it seems that we tell different versions of the same story—of the same truth—in order to make some sense of  our experiences because the old adage that “truth hurts” is probably one of the most difficult things to learn and accept about life.

 The theme that truth is painful continues with Mami’s recollections of their early years in New York.  The Garcias flee the Dominican Republic due to the worsening political situation, with “years of disappearing friends, sleepless nights, house arrest, narrow escape” and they leave their large extended family and friends for a somewhat uncertain future in America (28).  Growing up in the relative safety of the family compound, the young Garcia girls do not understand why they had to leave the D.R. and start a new and difficult life in America.  When they beg their mother to go back, she tells them the truth because “Now that we were far away and I wasn’t afraid of their blurting things out, I tried to explain.  But it was as if they thought I was lying to them with a story to make them behave” (29).  The girls are unable to handle the truth about the danger their family was in because, often times, it is difficult for children to reconcile the idyllic and beautiful island setting with the dangers of living in a totalitarian state ruled by a brutal and capricious dictator.  The girls’ perception of the D.R. is one filled with the love of their extended family and they wanted to “go back to their cousins and uncles and aunts and the maids” but their parents’ perception of the D.R. is one of danger and fear because of their father’s subversive involvement with anti-government groups (29).

 Another aspect of truth that Alvarez explores in the novel is how people use the truth to serve their own purposes and that revealing, adding, and/or omitting parts of the truth is acceptable as long as it serves one’s purposes or spares the feelings of another.  For example, during their first year in New York, a social worker visits the Garcia home because “the girls seem so anxious” and Yolanda’s been telling stories that “are a little disturbing” (33).  Mami, afraid that they might be sent back to the D.R., fills the social worker’s ears full with what is happening back on the island—homes raided, people hauled off, torture chambers, electric prods, attacks by dogs, fingernails pulled out.  I get a little carried away and invent a few tortures of my own—nothing the SIM hadn’t thought up, I’m sure (32)

Mami adds to the truth in order to guarantee that they are allowed to stay in America but also as a way to explain Yo’s somewhat inventive stories of “kids locked in closets and their mouths burned with lye.  Bears mauling little children” (33).  But the irony is that Yo’s stories mirror their life in America and not in the D.R. because her perceptions of her childhood home are quite different than that of her parents.  Yo tells her stories as a way to deal with her mother’s punishments—being locked in the closet for something bad, Tabasco sauce on the tongue for inappropriate language, and the mink coat used as a bear disguise to frighten the girls into behaving.  And the final irony is that Yo’s “imaginative” stories reveal more of the truth because she “is able to speak of what terrifies her” while her mother “can’t find the words in English—or Spanish” to express the terror she felt while living in the D.R., always afraid that her family would be taken by the SIM and tortured or worse, killed, for being against the government (34).  Yo’s imaginative stories reveal more truth about her mother’s feelings than her mother’s own straightforward accounts of the dangers back on the island.

 As an adult, Yolanda continues to manipulate the truth in order to suit her needs.  For example, she forbids her boyfriend, Dexter Hays, from answering the phone when they’re together because her father might call.  She does not want her father to know that she is lying and not really doing research at the Library of Congress but is instead visiting and staying with her boyfriend.  When Dexter protests with “I just don’t get why a grown woman can’t do what she wants,” Yo’s response is “I can do what I want…But why rub it in his face?  He’s seventy-two years old—what’s the point?  Let him die thinking that I regained my virginity after my divorces” (191).  She cannot tell her father the truth because to do so would disappoint him and perhaps shatter his perception of Yo’s purity and his respect for her Catholic upbringing.  Furthermore, she does not want to hurt his feelings.  Yo again hides the truth when Dexter unexpectedly visits her in the D.R.  She tells everyone that he is just a “journalist” friend covering the elections and even orders Dexter to bring a tape recorder in order to make the pretense as real as possible.  Dexter’s discomfort regarding Yo’s sometimes half-truths and sometimes lies go beyond sparing her parents grief.  This is different because “Yo’s fabrications are not just about saving somebody’s feelings or her ass.  It’s as if the world is her plaything and she can just pick up the facts and make them what she wants” (195).  He even begins to question everything she has ever told him and “suddenly the world seems very complicated, a world which is not simply black and white, but a shifting interplay of shadows” that Dexter has a difficult time not only understanding, but also living in as he tries to live up to her fabrications down in the D.R. (195).  Yo has no problem with making up these stories because she understands that how one perceives a situation is sometimes more important than the truth.  By not telling her father or her extended family the truth about her relationship with Dexter, she can avoid the feelings of guilt that her conservative family would probably make her feel for having a relationship with a man outside of marriage. But the ease at which she fabricates stories goes beyond simply trying to spare the feelings of others—it is a way of dealing with the pain of the truth.

 When Dexter asks her if her family believes their cover story, she emphatically answers:
Of course, they bought it…It’s all one big story down here, anyway.  The aunts all know that their husbands have mistresses but they act like they don’t know.  The president is blind but he pretends he can see.  Stuff like that (197). It almost seems as if no one is able to deal with the truth, but as Oscar Wilde once wrote “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” and this is proven time and again in this novel.  To explain to her family and relatives her relationship with Dexter would be too complicated because even Yo has not come to any real decisions regarding Dexter.  When he suggests that he could marry her, she reminds him that they have only been dating for five months and seeing each other only on weekends, which means that they’ve “only really known each other forty days” (189).  It seems easier to deal with the pain of the truth by simply not acknowledging it and sometimes downright denying it regardless of the facts, as seen in the case of Sarita, the maid’s daughter.

 At Yo’s third wedding, all her family, including aunts, uncles, and cousins come to celebrate with her and her new husband, Doug.  It is there that one sees how even when the facts are loudly proclaiming the truth, people sometimes deny it because to admit the truth would change all of one’s perceptions.
Before Sarita’s mother died, she claimed that Sarita was really the daughter of Arturo de la Torre, one of Yo’s uncles.  His widow, Flor de la Torre, calls the story “preposterous” and refuses to believe that her husband slept with the maid.  Instead, when she would catch him looking at Sarita’s mother, she believed in his lies that “he was a lover of all arts, including the natural art displayed on a beautiful human face or chest or…a backside” and that he never went beyond mere admiration (228).  She is unable to face the truth that Sarita has her late husband’s “familiar eyes, the curve of that jaw, the way she swings her arms like Arturo when she walks…she has the de la Torre dimple in her chin and the hazel eyes from the Swedish great-great-grandmother” and simply rationalizes that Sarita’s resemblance is only a coincidence (229).  She is unable to admit the truth because to do so would challenge her long-held tradition of the separation of the classes and to claim Sarita, would go against her cultural views.

Flor de la Torre is unable to see Sarita as anything other than the maid’s daughter regardless of the fact that Sarita is now an orthopedist and owns one of the leading sports medicine clinics in the country.  As Sarita wryly observes, “To that old guard from the D.R., I’ll always be the maid’s daughter, no matter how many degrees hang on the wall and how many receptionists you have to talk to to get to me” (225).  Unable to let go of her perceptions, Flor de la Torre cannot accept the truth about Sarita, regardless of how successful she has now become.  For Flor, academic, economic, and personal success does not change the social status one was born into.  And to openly acknowledge Sarita would be to acknowledge the painful truth that her husband lied and cheated on her. The continual denial of truth often has negative and sometimes long-lasting effects.  Although Yo has achieved success as a writer, she feels insecure and at times doubtful of her career as a writer.  After hearing a lecture about “baby boomers who never had children are committing genetic suicide” Yo becomes depressed and seeks the help of her father (294).  Throughout the novel, Yo feels the loss of choosing her career over having children and the lecture and the birth of  Sandi’s baby cause her to doubt if she choose the right path in life.  But the truth of the matter goes beyond choosing a career over children because Yo questions her destiny.  She asks Papi, “I’ve just started to wonder, you know, did I go down the wrong road?  Did I make a big mistake?” (295).  Papi reassures her that her “destino has been to tell stories” and calls it a blessing that she has been able to live out her destiny (295).  She continues to question her father’s certainty that she is living out her destiny because of all the pain it has caused her.  But underlying her doubts and insecurities is the fact that the truth about an early experience has been hidden from her and it is this truth that will set her free from the prison of insecurity and doubt.

Papi tells Yo that he will give her a special blessing when they see each other on Thanksgiving because in the Bible, when the father gives his blessing, it “makes the curse of doubt go away” (296).  In looking back on Yo’s childhood, Papi realizes the truth that it was he who causes some of her insecurities and doubts.  From the time she could talk, Yo has always been telling stories.  As a young child, she would peruse his medical books and tell the “sick people stories to make them feel better” (300).  But often, her storytelling would get her into trouble, like the time she told the maids that her grandparents had been sent away to have their heads cut off (303).  And it is one of these stories that eventually has a  large impact on the adult Yo.

Yo and her sisters had gone to General Molino’s house to watch the American westerns and it was there where she blurted out that her father had “many big guns hidden away” and that “my papi is going to kill all the bad people with those guns” (305).  Of course, what young Yo didn’t realize was they were living during a time when such talk could have gotten her family killed by the secret police and because of this story, her parents severely punish her.  Papi recalls bringing the belt down “over and over, not with all my strength or I could have killed her, but with enough force to leave marks on her backside and legs.  It was as if I had forgotten that she was a child, my child, and all I could think was that I had to silence our betrayer.  ‘This should teach you a lesson,’ I kept saying. ‘You must never ever tell stories!’” (307).  This incident is forever seared in the memory of Yo, but it is not enough to stop her storytelling.  Yet it is enough to cause her to continually doubt the choices she has made in life in order to be a writer.

Papi never reveals the truth that he felt great shame at punishing Yo and he realizes in speaking to her about her destiny that he must reveal the deeper truth of that long ago experience.  Papi also realizes that by changing the facts of that shameful experience, he and Yo can discover a deeper truth, a truth that will set Yo free.  He plans to tell Yo at Thanksgiving, "My daughter, the future has come and we were in such a rush to get here!  We left everything behind and forgot so much.  Ours is not an orphan family.  My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will now know the way back unless they have a story.  Tell them of our journey.  Tell them the secret heart of your father and undo the old wrong.  My Yo, embrace you destino.  You have my blessing, pass it on "(309).

The truth is that stories help us to understand who we are and those who have the gift of storytelling are able to guide others in achieving that understanding.  Although the author does not write about Yo’s reaction to Papi’s blessing, one can be fairly certain that the truth in Papi’s blessing will set Yo free from the chains of doubt and insecurity regarding her life.  Papi’s blessing is reminiscent of Isaac, a patriarch of the Old Testament, who blesses his son Jacob, who eventually becomes the father of the nation of Israel.  Without his father’s blessing, Jacob would not have been able to fulfill his destiny.  Only when Yo receives her father’s blessing will she be able to fully fulfill her destiny and enjoy the walk on the path she has chosen because it is the right path for her.  By removing the curse of doubt, Yo is now free to write her stories knowing that she is fulfilling her destiny.

 Like other Latino fiction writers such as Arturo Islas, Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina Garcia, and Junot Diaz, Alvarez explores the theme of truth in her novel, Yo!  Alvarez successfully demonstrates that people’s perceptions often determine what they believe to be the true.  Often, people either manipulate or deny the truth because it often brings deep pain. But the denial of truth imprisons us and until truth is acknowledged, it cannot set us free.