"A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art." -Julia Glass
A memoir is based on a real story, something that actually happened while fiction is something created from a sliver of an idea. Fiction can be based off of real events, but ornaments are added to make it what it is, which is fiction, not real. Memoirs take the cold, hard truth and write it into a book without any sugar-coating. Glass is comparing memoirs and fiction to blankets and quilts to illustrate how she differentiates between the two. A blanket is just a blanket, with nothing added, nothing changed and worn from use. A patchwork quilt, however, has patches and other things added onto it, taking away from its base which is essentially a blanket. But covering it in the decorations makes it into something that isn't real, that distracts from the raw story.
Glass, in the last sentence of the quote, says that fiction is art. She is suggesting, in a way, that art isn't real, that it has no real purpose other than to be pretty and solely for entertainment purposes. A memoir is art as well because writing is an art form and taking something that happened in real life and writing it into the form of a book is art. Glass believes that, because fiction is not real and it isn't based on anything that actually happens in the real world, that it has no real purpose. Fiction may not be based on real events, but it can hold a deeper message, something abstract that can be demonstrated in real life, like rebelling against a corrupt society. Glass doesn't count fiction as real because it distorts the true story, but it highlights it in a way. A quilt is just a quilt, but with patches, it becomes beautiful and something to treasure.
Memoirs display the story of a person or a situation that happened in real life and present it to the world so the people will be made aware. The "blanket" is just a simple piece of cloth to use to keep warm without any accessories, without anything to take away from its one purpose. Glass believes in the cold, hard truth and facts rather than fiction because fiction takes away from what is real. She believes that it blows up the truth rather than just state it like memoirs do. Fiction is for entertainment and it can also tell a great story like memoirs do. Both genres are forms of art and they both have their respected purpose. Just because memoirs display real-life events doesn't mean that fiction can't. Fiction just adds interesting plot lines that appeal to the people in order to get their underlying meaning out.
Memoirs are art, too, Glass. Fiction and memoirs go hand in hand in the fact that they are both written words displaying a message.
