Post 5: The Question of Non-Fiction

For a book to be considered non-fiction, it must be factual, or at least 80% factual. If the author calls the book a memoir, but changes their life to seem better than they actually are, it bothers me a little bit. I understand that the author is just doing this to spice it up and sell more copies, but it's another thing to go around completely changing your life story. 

I agree with Aimee Bender when she says that she doesn't really care what the genre is, as long as it's interesting. I mostly just read fiction, but I don't care as long as it captures my attention. She also said that it's interesting to see how a writer will represent their thoughts in the book. I agree with her, especially when I am forced to read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It's been labeled as a masterpiece mix of fiction and non-fiction; and through our many discussions during class I have come to agree with that. It's really interesting to see how he displays the murderers in a way that's figurative and still factual. For the time period the book was written, the 1960's, it was a relatively new thing to mix those two genres, and he did it very well. 

I think that David Shields is right in the sense that he wants to break free from the boundaries of genre labels. He has the right intentions; I just don’t think he’s doing it right. On the other hand, I think that genres are just labels that organize the library. It shouldn’t matter what the genre is, but whether it’s truthful or not is something different. Changing the way something happened, even if you aren’t labeling it, is still wrong.