"fictional life" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use the phrase in a variety of contexts to refer to a life created in fiction. For example: "The author imagined a vibrant fictional life for her characters in the novel."
Long before the first "Matrix" was released, of course, there was a lot of fictional life in the idea that life is a fiction.
Recent fiction is well enough populated with great authors forced into fictional life by lesser ones.
"Everybody leads a fictional life," he said.
It adds the doubleness of all fictional life.
A fictional life of the composer Robert Schumann.
Or, rather, fictional life is often something like fictional life in other books: Nesbit's Victorian London seems little different from Tartt's contemporary Manhattan.
One crucial fact the otherworldliness of his ability on the court has occasioned a science-fictional life.
To me that was a mirror of how real, non-fictional life cannot just be slotted neatly into a pre-defined genre, but is everything at one time.
Edmund Morris, the official biographer who was so baffled by his subject that he published a semi-fictional life history in 1999, says in the HBO documentary "Reagan" that questioning the former president was like "talking into a large, rather cool cave".
Things only go downhill from there, such as when Amanda totally gives up pretending she doesn't know everything that should happen to these people who think they're leading a normal, non-fictional life, and starts saying insane things to people like, "The funny thing is, you're actually going to marry Elizabeth Bennet, but she's not here".
Alas, in life - and fictional biography - no such principle obtains.
