Spencer Bailey

And what about all the others?

What about my mother?

Only later did I come to realize that that memorial failed to do what the best memorials do, which is kind of have this more what I would call a polyvocal experience as opposed to this sort of monolithic singular story or the sort of biblical hero story in this case of the little boy being carried by the strong man.

Well, we'll definitely talk about that later in the show as you wrote the entire book about memorials and what they mean.

You've said there were years when you worried you would spend the rest of your life being the little boy in the photograph.

When did you first begin consciously trying to build an identity beyond survival?

Probably knowingly in high school.

My early teen years were tough, really, really rough, the way a lot of kids are.

You're trying to figure out your sense of self, your identity, where you fit in the world.

Add to that, it was my dad attempting to raise three boys.

We lived in a frat house, basically.

We even had a urinal in our house, actually.

Wow.

But...

Yeah, I guess around age 11 or 12, I had convinced my dad to buy me a drum set.

And maybe that was like the first real outlet where I felt like I could get away from it all, where I could pursue an art and kind of lose myself in something.

And so I would go down to the basement for hours on end and just bang away.

The first year I had the kit, I wasn't even taking lessons.

I just mimicked what I saw drummers on television doing.

or in, in films or that sort of thing.