Truth in a Memoir

Children are taught to be honest from minute they begin to speak. They are told to do what is right and to always tell the truth no matter how much it might hurt the person that they are telling. So why is it that everyone stills lies despite the fact that no one wants to be lied to?

Honestly, I think it is because people are too hyped up on pretending that their lives can be perfect. People mess up, it is human nature, and there should be no shame to this. Yet, people feel pressured into lying so that they seem like a better human being to others, seeming like someone who will never make a single mistake. However, under the circumstances of writing a non-fiction novel they must set aside these insecurities of seeming dull or like an awful person to write what the audience is expecting; and what they are expecting is the blunt, straight up truth. One-hundred percent honesty is what makes a story non-fiction, and even if it is 99.9% honest, there is no rounding. Non-fiction is exactly what its name is implying, to not be fiction, or in other words, to be an accurate story. If it is not truthful, it is not non-fiction, and it is as simple as that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, books like A Million Little Pieces, are still quite inspiring and seemingly authentic but not non-fiction. Books like this still instigate drive and punch to overcome the toughest of battles but how can you lie to your readers about a story that is so precious? People read books like this expecting to be enlightened, expecting that what they are reading is not impossible but conceivable. There is something about reading a non-fiction piece that provides hope for the reader and lets them completely know that something so great can actually happen, that these things are not just dreamt of as a fairytale ending.

I believe that it is okay to stretch the truth, sometimes it is needed to make an otherwise boring story audacious and spunky, and truthfully that is what people want from a book. They want to be on the edge of their seats, practically ripping the pages out of their bind to get to the next one. Therefore, I don’t think it is wrong that people like Frey and Mortenson changed their stories to expand their reader base, however, it was wrong to falsify the readers emotions into believing that these remarkable things were a true event.

I think that labels on books, as in genres, help to let the reader know what they are going to be reading. If not for these labels, I could pick up a horror book that frightens the daylights out of me, something I could not enjoy. These labels are important in establishing a base of what the reader can expect from that novel and for me, knowing what I can expect and knowing whether it’s true or false determines how I interpret the text. However, I can totally see the argument of genres classifying books that don’t need to be classified, after all, shouldn’t readers decide if they want to believe it or not?

Readicide - What Should Schools Do?

What should schools do to get their students to enjoy reading? I think that the answer is pretty clear; genre fiction is what we like so it is what we should get. Now I know that this sounds bias coming from a student, a hater of Shakespeare, a Spark-Noter, but as a student I believe that it should be our say anyways.

Gallagher’s argument of Readicide is completely accurate. Schools should stop teaching so much literary fiction; I mean a little goes a very long way. For example, a new Shakespeare play every year of high school is kind of ridiculous, and I have yet to be in a class where more than one person enjoys reading the works of Shakespeare and interpreting his everlasting Old English language. Genre fiction is what kids in this century will appreciate and be able to relate to.

Most literary works we read in school are old, and students’ automatically associate old things with boring things, so, before the teacher is even done announcing the title to the class, we are already completely against the idea. These literary novels have nothing to do with this day and age and don’t prepare our generation for what we are going to encounter when we get older. Seriously, killing the king of Scotland to become king yourself…why must we know about this? Genre fiction seems to better apply to our future and get us ready for what is to come while also presenting problems that we might encounter during this time period.

Now, I am not saying that all literary works need to be removed from the curriculum; however, not every book we read in school needs to be a literary one. Schools should keep the literary books that are tolerable for students, like The Color of Water and In Cold Blood and remove from the list the ones that send students to the computer screen rather than the book itself. Because, even though literary novels tend to be boring, they are also excellent sources of respectable writing that is a necessity when a student will need to write for themselves in the future.

A 21^st century reading list should look a lot like the ones that we receive in this Best Sellers class. Students are given the option to read whatever they choose, be it literary or genre fiction. In this class we still dig deep into topics but the topics are more modern and are easily discussed, whereas the topics we discuss in a regular English class seem dull, pointless and not nearly as profound.

Genre fiction enlightens, entertains, and gets students wanting to do their homework as well as read. And after all, isn’t that the point of assigning books to read in school in the first place?

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