Recently I finished Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe (an excellent read I highly recommend due to her poetic prose, complex characters, and willingness to enter into suffering and beauty). In it she comments that museums, with their metered environments, lose the contexts of churches and homes for art. This made me think about museum installations. Are they the artist’s desire to create context where none exists?

I suppose "no context" is impossible. How about sterile? Removed? Unfamiliar with the breathings of our daily lives?

***

Over the past several years, memoirs have invaded Barnes and Nobles. I recently read an article about this plethora of memoirs. The author (Daniel Mendelsohn) compared this to the phenomenon of reality TV. He remarked, "If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?"*

In a global, transient, cyber world, are memoirs our attempts to grasp a lost context? The question, "Where are you from?" becomes more and more difficult to answer without giving an essay.

Mendelsohn also notes that this may stem from a misunderstanding of the type of truth presented by fiction, "’a truth’ about life," he says, "whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent ‘the truth’ about specific things that have happened." While not wanting to dismiss all memoirs by any means, in a world where specifics shift faster than we change our shampoo bottles, perhaps we look for specifics rather than general truths in the books we read.

*quote from "But Enough About Me" in The New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2010, p. 73.