Are stories lies?

They’re certainly a discrimination — some facts excluded, some emphasized and colored. Stories have an agenda, whether or not the person telling them does: connect friends and lovers; increase market share; unite nations. 

The midwife of a good story is “permissible embellishment.”

And we all can become victims of the fact that every tale needs a villain.

Finally, theories of “non-dual” Enlightenment in Buddhism and Hinduism seem to insist that arriving at Truth requires you to see all narrative as illusion.

I think we can resurrect stories from here. 

It comes down to Attachment — the idea that you cannot live without a particular story, and hence becoming trapped in it.

In the book of Matthew, it says

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven. 

This is usually taken as a moral criticism of wealth, but it’s perhaps better read as a caution against attachment. The rich man may have his wealth. His life will be more comfortable, he will have more time and freedom to find wisdom. But if he becomes attached to his possessions they will destroy him. 

Under the strict standards of non-duality, an individual can inhabit a story and remain awake, provided she sees the details of the story as fundamentally a game. If she gives her life to the story, the story becomes a full and undivided expression of her being.

Her immersion is so total that the ending is allowed permission to write itself. 

That to me is Truth.

In 'The Bhagavad Gita,' Krishna tells Arujna

“So, without clinging 
always perform
actions to be done.
When one performs actions to be done
without clinging
one attains
the highest.”

There are certainly "actions to be done" — you don’t have to sit still for long to realize that. 

Human action derives its intrinsic order from narrative.

The clinging is the problem.