‘A History of Hollows’ offers an artist’s powerful snapshot of her aging mother’s home

In “Apricots,” the essay which opens her memoir, The Faraway Nearby (2018), the critic Rebecca Solnit writes, “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions, like arctic tundra or sea ice.”

“To love someone,” she continues, “is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”

Micaela...