Don't judge a book by its truthfulness

While I was waiting for a document last night, I stumbled on this:

Augusten Burroughs' new book. I ordered it from Amazon in about 4.2 seconds. To those poor ignorant souls who don't know who Burroughs is. He's the guy who wrote "Running With Scissors", this amazingly written (and also a commercial mega hit) memoir. Sadly, they made that brilliant book into a really bad movie. What a tragedy.

Burroughs, like other recent memoir writers (notably James Frey), has had to face challenges on the truthfulness and accuracy of his memoirs. People have gone to great lengths to prove that Burroughs and Frey made up parts of their bestselling memoirs. Now here's my take on all that:

I don't care.

I don't care if he made the whole damn thing up. So Barnes and Noble should put the book on the "Fiction" shelf instead of the "Non-fiction" one. Whopee-f*ing-dooo. A book (unlike witnesses in court) should not be judged on truthfulness. To be honest, I don't see what the big deal is about fake memoirs. As far as I'm concerned, truth has nothing to do with a well written story.

You try writing a real one.