Blog Post #5 Truth In Memoir

In my mind a book has to be pretty true for the most part to be considered non-fiction. I agree with Mark Haskell Smith in that sometimes you have to cover up names in order to mask identities. Smith also said that he writes things the way he sees them and in that sense the truth may be distorted in some effect, but the main idea is still true. I would agree with Smith on this as well, unless the persons bias is extreme. Half truths are great to read but it should explicitly say in the front of the book all of the facts that were distorted or just create an in between genre. A name for this genre could be Personal nonfiction that way people will know before hand that the book they are about to read is going to have skewed facts but may be more interesting than a completely accurate book. It does matter when authors like Frey bend the truth because he bent the truth about himself and then accepted sympathy and support for something he didn't really accomplish and go through. I think of Frey as an extreme example and he would should have classified his book under a special genre that explicitly states half of the facts are not true. However I do not agree with Janet Fitch and her views on non fiction because she believes that if non fiction is anywhere in the title it has to be 100% true. And that is not realistic because there is no way to validate a specific personal account of an incident if we are referring to memoirs. No matter what there are going to be distorted facts, but i think there levels of distortion that lead to in between genres.