Best Sellers post 8: Truth in a memoir

I believe in order to be considered nonfiction you need to stay mostly (at least 98%) true. I believe this because you don’t want to read a book that is supposed to be pretty much completely true and then find out it was all lies or some of the major parts were altered or lied about. If that were me I would be not furious but very disappointed with the author.  I can understand if they were trying to recall something say from the age of 6 and couldn’t quite exactly remember everything so they had to fill in the blanks a little. But I don’t think you should change or alter the big events in your story because that’s the main part. That’s where your honesty counts the most, especially when writing a memoir. You as an author are telling about your life and I know it can be tempting to make it sound more interesting but that’s not what a memoir is for. If you want to make your life or maybe a fictional characters life in some cases super interesting and untrue then go write a fictional piece. There is a reason why nonfiction is nonfiction and fiction is fiction. Again if there are a few mishaps in your story due to the fact it was a long time ago that’s not a big deal because its little details that in all honesty are not that important. But if you go and change major events of the story that’s where it becomes wrong and in my opinion should not be considered a nonfiction or memoir piece.