There’s fact, and then there’s fiction, right?

There’s work that is a product of careful research, and then there’s work that is a product of the imagination. Nonfiction looks outward for verification. Fiction looks inward for truth. A simple dichotomy.

Too simple.

The more I read, the more I write, and the longer I live, the less sure I am about this distinction.

Take memoir, for example, which is considered -- categorized, listed and sold -- as nonfiction. But most memoir is not based on research. It is based on memory. Memoir is the heavily filtered, carefully reconstructed, deliberately crafted story the memoirist wants, or needs, to tell. It is personal experience as the writer perceived it or rather, remembered perceiving it or, more likely, remembered remembering . Just how many blanks are filled in by imaginative re-creation.? Was it raining that day when I was five and I saw my brother fall out of the tree? Was I wearing that pale blue t-shirt? Wonderful, moving, powerful stories are often told. But can we call this nonfiction?

We hear about the fictional quality of this so-called nonfiction only when something big goes wrong, when someone who knew the Boy Called It says he wasn’t really locked in that closet for all those years, when Jennifer Lauck’s brother publicly disputes her literary recounting of a terrible childhood, when Lorenzo Carcaterra’s boyhood buddies, main characters in his book, all say, sorry, it just didn’t happen that way.

And what about other works of supposed nonfiction like Dutch, the Ronald Reagan biography of a few years back? Biography is a well-respected member of the nonfiction family. But author Edmund Morris decided the actual, factual story of Ronald Reagan was not interesting enough. There was no there, there. (One can sympathize, given the subject.) So he invented characters, including a fictionalized version of himself and an imaginary gossip columnist, and inserted them into the narrative. Fiction inside of nonfiction. What does one call that?

And then there is the fascinating case of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a nonfiction classic, hailed as the first “nonfiction novel.” We now know that Capote created material for the book. He wrote a key scene into his nonfiction account, a scene that took place only in his imagination.

I am not faulting these authors or trying to take away from their work. I am simply saying that nonfiction is not a hermetically sealed category.

Neither is fiction. Take John Steinbeck who went out on a reporting assignment for Life magazine and ended up using the material he gathered to write Grapes of Wrath. There in fact (in fact) was a Joad family. Their name was not Joad, of course, but they were real. Steinbeck thoroughly researched them and their life. Daniel DeFoe, a journalist before he was a novelist, also based his fiction on his reporting. There was a Moll Flanders, for example, a real woman who lived where the fictional Moll Flanders lived, whose life paralleled hers in very many ways.

Writers of fiction have always used the real world, real people, real places, real events, to help construct the “fictional” stories they tell.. The roman a clef is generally admitted to be nonfiction reupholstered as fiction.. Other books are so deeply and carefully researched, their plots taken directly from real life – Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders comes to mind – that calling them fiction denies their authenticity.

This doesn’t make these works less commendable. If anything, it makes them more powerful. Fiction is not a hermetically sealed category either.