Do you feel like all fiction is inherently duplicitous, just to a greater or lesser degree? It's all completely fake, of course. But I think that a work of fiction that claims to be a true story is not "more fake", but fake in a different way (vs a work of fiction that is up-front about being purely imaginary.)

Like, if James Cameron claimed that Titanic was based on the true romantic story of two real passengers on the Titanic, that's clearly not the same thing as making up a story about two fictional people on the Titanic.