Yesterday, a novelist told me that non-fiction was dishonest. He said that his fiction is truer than non-fiction, because truth is imagined anyway, and that at least fiction writers own up to their artifice.

I told him about the prosecutor in Roman Polanski's case. Years after Polanski had led the country, the prosecutor gave a filmmaker a long interview, and in it he admitted that the DA had forged evidence in the case against Polanski. The filmmaker took the interview and put it in her movie, for anybody to see. But now that Polanski is in custody and might face trial again, the prosecutor recanted all the statements he made in the movie. He said he just made it all up!

This is a case where truth turned out to be fiction, maybe. Documentary films exist in a gray area somewhere between truth and fiction anyway. I guess any story that really hooks you in has got to be carefully constructed, even if it's made up of facts.

Professionals who tell true stories are like translators. Have you ever read two different translations of the same book? A book that can be clunky and dense in one version can be fluid and clean in the other. Translators have this power. So do journalists, or documentarians, or biographers.

Or anybody, for that matter, in the case of their own lives. Every conscious moment, I'm telling myself the story of how I've gotten to the present moment. It's how I remember anything. And depending on how I interpret my own history, that's who I am.

So you could just as easily say that the very idea of fiction is misleading, because it assumes the existence of its opposite - fact. But facts themselves are made up of presumptions, best-guesses, and our obscured views. So I don't mind if non-fiction tells only one truth, because one is better than none.