Post 5

In my opinion, to be non-fiction, a book needs to be 100% true. But my view of what is considered non-fiction is a slim margin. Non-fiction, to me, are books that cover events in history or animals or plants or any factual thing that can be researched and backed up. Memoirs do not fall into that category. To me, memoirs are just another novel, just another story. If it actually happened, that's great and it can be truly inspiring. But so can fictional stories. And if there are falsehoods found in memoirs, so what? I mean, what did you expect? Like Seth Greenland said, memory is fallible, you cannot remember every single things exactly as it happened. And in my opinion, our lives are fictional because we view them in different ways (like Laila Lalami discussed) and we all like to believe/interpret events in the way we want to. We are all authors in this way. So I believe it is ok for "memoirs" to be half-truths as in Frey's case. For maybe in his mind, one afternoon in jail felt like 9 months in prison. How can we judge and pick on him for how he portrayed his life? The only things I was not happy with was that he went on talk shows and interviews claiming it was all true.
So is David Shields right? Do we need classifications like fantasy, non-fiction, etc.? I don't think so. I don't think our understanding or liking would change if books were not classified. I even believe people would branch out more in the kind of books they read if there were no genres at all. For example, if someone read a book they did not like that was classified as a mystery, it could ruin the rest of the genre to them. Yet if it was not dubbed "mystery", that person could find another detective book and fall in love with it. Genres do not matter. Books should not be labeled or classified, for they are all unique. Some say books allow you to live a hundred lives. I agree, but I think it's more than that. Reading gives the books themselves life and they capture it with every turn of their pages.