How True, is True?

To give a physical number as to the amount of a book that should be completely true to consider it Non-Fiction, I would have to say at least 98% of the material as a whole must be truthful for it to be considered under the Non-Fiction umbrella. This is because relatively that is what history texts tend to be and they should out of all under the genre umbrella be the most truthful, some very very small inaccuracies and minute events that effect no other events being omitted for the sake of length are fine. It is when the inaccuracies are glaring and obvious and when events that directly effect others are modified then the genre divide begins to form.

Considering books that poster themselves as Non-Fiction but are in reality half-truth, or in actuality half-lies, the matter is simple. These books like Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" are Fictional stories that follow a Non-Fiction format. Frey says that only 18 pages are changes overall and that makes up around 5% of his book, if the events of those 18 pages are crucial to any other part of the story then it isn't 5% Fiction, every event those pages create or embellish have a direct effect on the rest of the story. For instance if you in reality went to jail for a day and were mildly uncomfortable, but in the book that you claim is legitimate you state you spent several months in a prison then the rest of the book the reader now has that time-frame and experience issue, being involved in a crash that kills students and being completely indirectly effected by a crash that kills students that you happened to kinda know are two completely different things on both a physical, meta-physical, and psychological level and all of that will drastically change how your characters are viewed by readers.

On the matter of if Mr. Shields is correct in saying that we don't need genre boundaries and that they limit writers. I feel that he has lost understanding of what genres do. Genres are at their most basic element a guideline for what a story should include and get rid of, they mix often and their boundaries are actually in many cases already very blurry, but what they do on a practical level for non-writers is what they are most useful for. Genre gives a reader the ability to a glance tell within a general idea what a book is about, Fantasy books will very clearly have completely different elements than a Murder-Mystery, if we preclude the use of genres overall the reader is who suffers, if libraries were to suddenly stop sorting books by genre the reader would have a more difficult time finding what they truly want to read. Seeing as how reading is already on such a scarcely balanced needle-head the advent of genres allows easy and quick access to books for everyone, Shields is merely taking the concepts of genre too seriously and has missed massive ulterior concepts in what genre really is.