"why try to define or label the work?"

“My Struggle” has set off a debate about which genre it properly belongs to. The original Norwegian version put the word “novel” on the title page, implying a certain distancing from the real events the book portrays, but that designation has been removed from the American edition, a decision that Mr. Knausgaard attributed to his American publisher, Archipelago Books.

“It was a conscious choice not to label the book for the reader,” Jill Schoolman, the founder of Archipelago, wrote in an e-mail. “I feel that ‘the project’ dwells comfortably between (and embraces both) fiction and memoir. (Aren’t they always inextricably entwined?) Why try to define or label the work?”

--from He Says a Lot, For a Norweigan.  Books. The New York Times (June 18, 2012)