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?