Truth in Memoir (Best Sellers)

I don’t think a book has to be completely true to be considered non-fiction; we all know that you aren’t ever going to be 100% accurate when it comes to things like dialogue and small actions / setting descriptions, so I don’t see a problem in changing the circumstances around a little as well.  I do think, though, that if it has a ton of insanely exaggerated or untrue points in it they need to say somewhere that it is based on a true story so people don’t assume that it is entirely true if that’s not the case: like Oprah did when she credited the author of A Million Little Things to having everything that happened in the story to have happened to him.  She got that impression by how he called it a memoir, and if he had said “based on a true story” she could have already understood that it couldn’t be entirely true; only based on things that happened to him in his lifetime.

Half-Truths are okay if it is still a good story I think because we don’t beg people to take our money for the book just because we heard it was a true story, we pay for the book because we think that it will be interesting and inspirational for the fact that it is a true story.  Even if some of the story may not be true, we still got what we wanted with an interesting and inspirational story that didn’t occur to us so doesn’t matter to us anyway where there are half-truths.  We just want to believe that things as amazing as these can happen; lessen the significance on what did happen.  So it doesn’t really matter to me (and shouldn’t to anyone else) that these authors bent the truth in their stories.

I think David Shields is right in the sense that a story is just a story, doesn’t really need to be labeled as true or untrue, but I disagree with the genre labels as in comedy, romance, etc. not being necessary because when I want to read something funny or sad or inspirational I think they need to be labeled as such so I don’t just search through a library in a giant section called “books”.  It ruins efficiency.