Spencer Bailey

And so...

I basically got to work.

I started researching global memorial culture and went super deep, picked, I think it's roughly 60 to 65 memorials around the world to sort of include in this book.

And as I was writing it, I realized that

I absolutely had to put my personal story in it, but how?

And ultimately decided that I would just write about it in the introduction.

Sort of make a first person, like, hey, you know, again, I'm going to take you on this journey into global memorial culture.

This is my story, this is who I am, and this is how it fits into everything from, like...

1982 Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial to 2019 Mass Design Group Gun Violence Memorial.

So it sort of takes readers on that journey.

And it was such... I mean, talk about that senior speech I did in high school, like...

This was that tenfold.

This was so cathartic, so deeply, profoundly life-altering to write this book.

And the strangest thing of all, actually, was the timing, because I turned it in in March 2020, the manuscript to the publisher, and it came out in October 2020.

So I had spent two and a half, three years more or less thinking about death, loss, atrocity, everything more or less that we were facing around the world when COVID came.

And then George Floyd and post-George Floyd and watching these monuments get torn down and

And here's where I should say the book makes a case and an argument for abstraction in a way argues against the hero figure or form, arguing that that's more like a sort of monumentality, whereas memorialization at its best is something slightly – can be monumental, but it's not a monument.

It's different.

There's a –

There's a different use of space.