I knew
That life was fiction in disguise.

In these lines Merrill compresses a characteristically self-reflexive insight: lived experience is apprehended through narrative, artifice, and the shaping pressures of memory. To say that “life was fiction in disguise” is not simply to call life false, but to suggest that the patterns by which we recognize meaning—plot, motive, coherence—are literary constructions we project onto events. The phrasing also hints at disguise and performance: identity and social life can feel like roles, while the “I knew” asserts a hard-won, perhaps disillusioned awareness. Read this way, the couplet becomes a credo about art’s proximity to life and life’s dependence on storytelling.