[BEST SELLERS]: Post 5: Truth In Memoir

Books to me, always need to be truthful. I have found several books, and even school textbooks, that show false, or misleading information. That is why I believe that non-fiction books should be nearly, or completely true, so if the book gets one piece of information wrong, it's not that big of a deal, it's just when the book gets a lot of pieces of information wrong, then there's a problem. Some facts are okay to get wrong, such as when Harriet Tubman was born, we only know around when she was born, but other facts, such as when the Magna Carta got signed, those need to be right, in 1215.

I would say as long as the authors in their memoirs are staying fairly close to the truth, then to me its still a good story, but when everything is just made up and the plot is all lies or when the truth happens, then they go onto a drop full of lies, that's just showing how pathetic of a writer they are, unless they are writing fiction. For example, in the book, Life of Pi, Pi needs to make up what actually happened in the book, to the press, in order to actually believe him. He did stay very close to what actually happened, the only thing he changed were the characters he interacted with.

I think that David Shields is really over his head when it comes to eliminating the fiction and nonfiction borderline. To me, that is what determines what books I read. I'm normally a Historical Non-fiction person, but occasionally I'd like to open a Mystery or Historical Fiction book, like Stephen King's 11/22/63. But really, the border between fiction and non-fiction cannot be destroyed, it will live on, because saying that there is a genre-less book is saying that there is a school with no name, a classroom with no teacher, if that makes sense. The border is permanent, in my opinion. I think that it matters to have genres because the readers need to know what they are reading about, like I thought when I was in seventh grade, that The Giver by Lois Lowry was a Magic Realism, because of how everything is viewed, until I found it in the Science-Fiction section of my school's library. So that is why I believe the line between genres shouldn't be eliminated.