Post 5: Truth in Memoirs

In today’s world, our society has become so obsessed with putting labels on everything. This can range from people, food, movies and literature. For a book to be considered a “non-fiction”, I think it really depends on the person. For me, personally, I feel that a book should be at least 98% true, allowing room for those tiny details to be exaggerated so the author seems cooler than they really are. Focusing on the main story of any work of writing is extremely important and if an author has to go so far as to faking their entire life in order to write a story- it might as well be considered “fiction”. I became very angry during Wednesday’s class when we were given four stories and asked which we think were true and which were not. One of the stories about a half Native American girl raised with gang members seemed like a heart-breaking yet inspiring tale of how she overcame her hardships, when in reality she was a white American that went to private school and lived a happy life. She ought to get “LIAR” tattooed onto her forehead. This leads into the half-truths dilemma and I’m pretty sure it’s already been addressed about how I feel towards half-truth stories. With the twenty-first century booming with all kinds of grand technology and innovative ways of thinking, nothing can remain a secret. In Frey’s case, he was a complete idiot to think that lying about medical records and criminal reports would actually go unnoticed. Everyone is nosey and putting yourself out there for the media to judge you, you better know you’re going to get ripped apart. With David Shields, he brought up an interesting idea, a way to write a book that wasn’t in any of his own words. I do think that he was a bit cocky to go forth and say on the Conan show that he gave no credit to the origin of the quote except for in the back of the book where it was written in small print. He really didn’t need to go that far into making his point across and it actually made me despise him. But he does bring up a good point about putting labels on things. However, books have always been this way. Order and stability are what we (try to) thrive on. Changing it and completely getting rid of genres would cause chaos. I think everyone just needs to stop trying to sound smarter than they really are and leave the author/artists purpose to itself. Quit trying to change everything to fit your way of standards.