A book has to be mostly accurate to be considered non-fiction. What I consider mostly accurate is that it doesn’t extend the truth like the three authors: Frey, Mortenson, or Shields did. When you are retelling a story to a group of friends or retelling a story for a novel you aren’t going to 100% remember what happened and you wouldn’t the big picture of what went on because it’s only from your point of view. In memoirs you have to be mostly accurate with your writing but not extend the truth like Mortenson did in his story by saying that he built 11 schools when in reality he only built three. Another example was when Frey said that 5% of his book was lies. Well that 5% affected the other 95% because now people will view him as a liar and will not believe the other 95% of his story.
Half-truths are ok if they are a good story but they shouldn’t be considered for non-fiction or a memoir because they are nothing close to the truth. If you stretch the truth so much that the memoir/non-fiction is not even close to being true and people discover that you were lying they are going to be mad at the author and not buy their books anymore. Frey and Mortenson’s dilemma and why they caused so much grief was because they extend the truth to make them sound better which in the end ruined them. If they had just stuck to the truth then no one would be mad at them.
I totally agree. If you pick up a 'nonfiction' book and read it, thinking that all of it is true, no matter how good it is, to find out that parts of it were not? That would ruin the whole book entirely. especially because you don't know what parts of the book are/ aren't true. for all we know the most important parts of the book were made up.
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