[Below, Putnam reviews Linda Katherine Cutting's Memory Slips and Gillian Helfgott's Love You to Bits and Pieces, both memoirs of trauma in the lives of accomplished pianists. In considering Cutting's autobiographical piece, Putnam asserts that the author would have been more successful in reaching "deeper introspection" had she employed a more conventional narrative style. Putnam also praises Love You to Bits and Pieces, Gillian Helfgott's account (written with Alissa Tanskaya) of her life with piano prodigy David Helfgott and his battle to overcome "a cruelly damaging relationship with his father," finding the book "told with sensitivity, wit and great self-assurance."]

"I think of my father, how bow-legged he was, how he wore down the outside soles of his shoes. What traumatized him? The war? He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, a sergeant in Patton's Third Army. Is that what made him violent?" writes Linda Katherine Cutting in her journal after listening to a lecture on trauma theory during her stay at the National Center for the Treatment of Trauma and Disassociation in Boulder, Colo. "I am looking and looking for some way to preserve the good father, to forgive the bad one."

Cutting's new book, Memory Slips: A Memoir of Music and Healing, is a kind of meditation on the theme of the destructiveness of the father. In journal-entry style, Cutting, a teacher at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., and once a busy concert pianist, recounts her departure from the concert stage to retrieve long-buried memories of sexual abuse and the painfully slow healing process that this entailed.

"There are three kinds of memory slips" when performing music, Cutting tells her students. "One, when memory slips but you find your way back without losing a beat. Two, when you don't find your way back until the downbeat. Three, when you don't find your way back in time and must stop and restart the music."

In July 1989, 6 1/2 bars into a Beethoven sonata, Cutting experienced a memory slip that touched off a 10-year search for an explanation as to why the sound of footsteps caused her to freeze on stage, forgetting the piece she was playing. "I had to make sure it wasn't him," Cutting writes. "I stopped, put my hands in my lap, and looked out at the audience. It was only a latecomer taking his seat." Several seconds later, having recovered her poise, Cutting restarted the piece and continued on through a program that included, in addition to the Beethoven, a Bartok sonata and Schumann's Fantasy in C.

Two narratives alternate throughout the book. One spans Cutting's year at the trauma center, the other a period of time 10 years prior to her stay there, detailing her life as a concert pianist jetting from one performance to another as the cracks in her marriage and her shaky sense of self begin to show. By telling her story in this way, Cutting says, she hopes to "mimic the way time is experienced in the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata, op. 109…. In the 1982–83 sections, time is moving quickly, even rushing by. In the 1992 sections, time slows down, almost to a standstill."

This is an ambitious goal, and if performing a sonata were in any way similar to writing a memoir, Cutting might have pulled it off. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a jumpy, self-conscious strategy that tries the reader's patience and renders it nearly impossible to piece together either Cutting's story or the part music played in her healing.

"Today is my first journal group," Cutting writes from the trauma center. "Strange, to be joining a group to write. I can't imagine joining a group to practice the piano—the cacophony of sound would be terrifying. Practicing the piano and writing are lonely acts. They are meant to be done in private. And yet they are the very acts that keep me from feeling entirely alone." A few moments later, after informing the leader of the group that she is already a writer, having written in journals for most of her life and having completed a novel, she states: "I have, after all, lost most of my dignity in this place. Writing, for me, is an embodiment, a second skin. It covers the vulnerability and still exposes what needs to have light. Along with practicing the piano, writing is the thing that's kept me alive."

What is the reader to make of this kind of vague, circular writing?

Whether Cutting is describing the landscape in Colorado ("The sky is bigger here. It's hard to explain. You only know it if you've spent time out west.") or how she feels, waiting for news of her brother David, missing for three days ("I've been climbing the walls at home. I can't sit at the piano for more than ten-minute intervals. I pace from room to room like a caged animal.") the core of her remembered experience and what it means to her remain a mystery.

After many pages of sketchy, impressionistic ruminations, the picture that emerges is of a young woman so shattered by the past that she finds it impossible to see her grownup self as separate from the victim of her childhood trauma. One can't help but wonder if a more conventionally patterned narrative might have helped Cutting gain the authorial distance so clearly needed to engage in the deeper introspection that a book-length memoir of this type demands.

..…

"You shouldn't have a 'father' thing. Just break out of it! Just break free!" was David Helfgott's advice to a young friend so tormented in childhood by an abusive father that it nearly derailed her musical career in later life. Helfgott, a piano prodigy who survived more than one nervous break-down and years of exile from the concert stage, has, as many already know from seeing the biographical movie Shine, made an impressive recovery from a cruelly damaging relationship with his father. His healing process is energetically described by his wife, Gillian Helfgott, in her memoir (written with Alissa Tanskaya) Love You to Bits and Pieces.

Gillian, an astrologer, met David in the early '80s when he was living in a boarding house in Perth, Australia, swimming like a fiend by day in a friend's pool and playing the piano in Riccardo's, a wine bar, by night. At their first meeting, he invited her to come hear him play.

"Riccardo's was by no means situated in a trendy part of town," Gillian writes. "Above the wine bar was a backpackers' hostel, and the bar itself had a '50s look with dark walls, chrome chairs and no windows…. As we entered, one could feel the audience's anticipation….

"David's fingers gently touched the keys and from the first sounds I could sense the crowd being drawn towards him. A change had come over David. The gangling, maniacally noisy creature, seemingly so insecure, became another person, completely absorbed and confident in his craft."

During a break, Gillian asked David to name his favorite piece. "Rak 3, Serge's Rak 3," he replied. He then went straight back to the piano and played Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in its entirety while a "spellbound" Gillian marveled at his "majesty and passion." Nine months later, after consulting their astrology charts to make sure the planets were favorably aligned, Gillian married David.

Gillian's account of how she and others helped David rebuild his career as a concert pianist is told with sensitivity, wit and great self-assurance. Laying to rest rumors of his inability to hold up under the strain of regular performances required shoring up David's fragile sense of self as well as regular exposure of his talent in venues more suitable to classical piano than the wine bar. To these and countless other rehabilitative tasks Gillian applied herself with gusto. After cutting David's cigarette, coffee and gum consumption to near zero during performances, she set to work discouraging his incessant muttering while playing.

"Sometimes he sang away and muttered, and sometimes he didn't," she writes, "and to this day one can never predict what he will do when left alone on a stage."

As Gillian points out, David's muttering acts as a kind of self-protection ritual to ward off the cloud of negativity implanted in his psyche early on by his father's violent outbursts and the obsessive, perfectionist demands he placed on his son's gifts. Throughout the book there are references to "the fog," David's term for the swirl of chaotic, rambling thoughts and painful recollections that prevented him for many years from developing his talent in the disciplined, structured way that a successful career as a concert pianist requires.

"The fog" first appeared in London in the summer of 1969, when, at age 22, after successfully performing his beloved "Rak 3" before an adoring audience at the Royal College of Music, David failed to follow his strong inclination to return home to Australia to nurture his talent in less-stressful surroundings. Instead, he remained in London, where, under the influence of intense competition at the school and problems with alcohol and medication to tamp down ever-present feelings of panic and fear, he suffered his first breakdown.

"After the Rak it all went chaos," he told Gillian. "It all went absolutely foggy and misty, foggy and misty."

David's struggle to permanently dispel "the fog" continues, as does Gillian's push to see him gain the recognition she feels he missed as a result of being kept so firmly under his father's thumb when his career could have been taking off. Whether they will be successful depends on many variables, not the least of which is David's fragile temperament. Add to that the maw of the celebrity machine in which they are now caught as a result of Shine and the strenuous concert tour the couple is racing to complete, and you have enough material for a sequel to Love You to Bits and Pieces.