[In the following review of Linda Katherine Cuttings' Memory Slips, Zukerman finds that the author "manages to write with simple candor and elegant prose about" her abuse as a child, "a subject that is too often sensationalized."]

For most of her life, Linda Katherine Cutting was ordered to apologize and to keep silent. "If you tell you'll burn in hell," she was admonished by her minister father. Remarkably, Cutting grew up to become a successful concert pianist, but her performances came to a halt when memory lapses at the keyboard jolted memories muted since early childhood. Her subsequent breakdown and her climb back from suicidal despair are recorded in Memory Slips.

Family violence, sexual abuse, the suicides of both of her brothers, her cruel and hypocritical father, her passively complicit mother—Cutting's book is a testimony to the power of music and to the courage of a gifted and deeply wounded woman.

Two narratives, 10 years apart, alternate throughout the book because, as the author explains, "Time is never strictly chronological in the way it is lived. Musicians know this. Anyone who has suffered grief, loss, or a broken heart knows this, too." This alternation affords the reader a necessary emotional rubato; her story is too harrowing to be told at a fast tempo. The narrative slips back and forth between 1982–83 and 1992. In the earlier years, when Cutting was performing with such orchestras as the Boston Pops, she was already experiencing recollections that troubled her. But it was not until 1992 that she was admitted to the National Center for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation. There, with the help of compassionate professionals, she began to put the pieces of her life back together.

Not only had she been abused by her father since the age of 6, but when she confronted her mother, she was met with total denial. "When I told her my father had molested me at home and at church, regular as his Sunday sermon," Cutting writes, "[Mother] assured me she didn't know about it. She also told me, 'If it were my father I'd never forgive him," then, 'You've got to forgive your father' and finally, 'My husband would never do that'." Linda Cutting is never self-pitying. She bravely faces the truth and even asks herself difficult questions, such as, "What does it mean to honor your parents? To pretend that these things never happened or to love and forgive them in spite of knowing? Forgiveness starts with confessing your sins. But they have never asked my forgiveness. I was always ordered to ask my father's forgiveness, and for most of my life, I did. I was also ordered to keep silence. For most of my life, I did that, too."

For most of her life, Cutting also had music as her rampart, and it is music that is at the heart of her recovery. As she writes, "Without the music there would only be the quicksand…." Cutting uses music both to mitigate her story and to tell it: "Scriabin, B-flat minor Prelude. It's spooky in the beginning, hushed, like someone is sneaking into your room late at night." The piano, we are told, "was sacred…. No one would touch me there. I was allowed to practice for hours." It was her father who encouraged her to practice, but it was also her father who did more than touch her. "Every Saturday night my mother typed my father's sermons. I remember lying in my bed hearing the metal letters strike the platen and the bell preceding each carriage return. I wondered how many bells before my father would enter my room."

Images of her father's midnight visits put a fermata on Linda Cutting's life. Breaking the silence enabled her to begin to heal and to finally play the piano again. Her brothers were not so fortunate. One hanged himself, the other shot himself "in a motel room in West Palm Beach. A three-fifty-seven magnum and two suicide notes were found next to him."

Cutting manages to write with simple candor and elegant prose about a subject that is too often sensationalized. She can even be kind to the man who tormented and betrayed her: "What I feel for my father in this moment is compassion. I watch him turning the pages of his past, see a sadness in his eyes, in his hands, in the slowness of his movements, a sadness that he has never let me close to." She writes lyrically about performing and about the process of learning and making music—"In the slow movement [of the Mozart Piano Concerto, K. 488] there is the stillness of a sleeping baby. I play the second theme more and more quietly until there is almost no sound. I hear my own breath, and feel that the audience breathes with me…."

Performance involves personal risk and public trial, but when, in the Treatment Center, Cutting finally plays for her fellow patients, it is an act of pure generosity: "The whole room is quiet and I know I need to remember Schumann's 'Scenes from Childhood'—not just for my self, but for every woman here who has lost hers."

Linda Cutting returned to the concert stage in 1995 at the age of 41. Memory Slips is her memoir of music and healing; it is poetic and poignant. She has created a powerful piece from the dark melodies and painful dissonances of her lost childhood.