A true story should be 99-100% true. As Seth Greenland said, we must make allowances for small gaps in memory. Laila Lalami also talked about how everyone remembers experiences differently. So naturally, there are going to be slight differences from one person's account of a story to another's account.
However, both of them also agreed that in non-fiction writing, there is not room for things that never actually happened. Writers can not claim to have experienced something if they never actually did.
Laila Lalami explains that there is a contract between readers and writers regarding non-fiction and fiction writing. In fiction, writers admit that the story is completely made up, and they invite readers to "come along for the ride". But in non-fiction, authors say to the readers that everything they wrote is true, even though they may have slight differences in their story than someone else's.
So, I think that if a writer is going to label something as non-fiction, it really has to be non-fiction! Writers exploit the trust of readers when they fabricate stories that are supposed to be true.
Now, to touch on David Shield's theory that we don't need lines between genres, I disagree. I think it's important to label books as "fiction" and "non-fiction" because readers need to know what's true and what's not. If there was nothing to distinguish between those things, people may begin to believe certain things happened that never actually did, and vice-versa.
The difference between fiction and non-fiction should be clear. Even if most of a story is true, if it speaks of even one fake experience, it should no longer be labeled as non-fiction. It should be labeled as being "based on a true story".
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