[Below, Moorman offers a positive review of Linda Katherine Cutting's Memory Slips, describing the book as dignified and eloquent.]

In 1989, Linda Katherine Cutting, a young, widely praised concert pianist, suffered a memory slip on stage. "I heard footsteps. Suddenly I was in the wrong key…. The footsteps came nearer to the piano…. I had to make sure it wasn't him." Six and a half bars into the opening of a Beethoven sonata, she stopped playing. "It was only a late-comer taking his seat," she writes in her extraordinary book, Memory Slips. She began again and mercifully made it through to the end of the piece.

This small lapse in Ms. Cutting's professional life signaled the intrusion of childhood memories that would soon overwhelm her. Only after a serious suicide attempt was she able to put past and present back together again during a hospitalization at the Center for Trauma and Dissociation, in Denver.

Ms. Cutting's trauma was intricately, almost eerily connected with her music. She describes sitting at an old upright piano in the hospital's cafeteria and beginning, tentatively, to play. Her fingers "suddenly remember one of Schumann's 'Scenes From Childhood.'" More of the Schumann comes to her, including two parts called "Frightening" and "A Child Falling Asleep." Suddenly she can't remember the next chord. "Where am I? What age? Five. I am 5 and I can't fall asleep…. Daddy's coming to tuck me in. Please, God, don't let him play those bad games…. I can't breathe. I'm frozen."

Ms. Cutting resolutely uncovers what she describes as memories of her minister father's sexual molestation of her, "regular as his Sunday sermon"; his sadistic whippings of her and her two brothers, both of whom killed themselves in young adulthood (a younger sister seems to have grown up unscathed); and her mother's utter failure either to protect or to comfort. The charges in this book are savage, yet she tells her story with restraint. It is a testament to her careful writing and to her humanity that in the end we are sure of our sympathy to her parents, even after all we know about them.

Ms. Cutting describes her memories of incest and violence through carefully chosen details—sticky hands, the stripes on her father's seer-sucker pajamas, his belt coming out of its loops. We also see Ms. Cutting's adult responses—her weight loss, her despair and her dependence on music to help her focus her mind and emotions. The slant of Ms. Cutting's descriptions protects readers from a sense of voyeurism and allows them to join with her as she struggles to remember what she was commanded to forget, to analyze its effects on her life and, steadily, to recover.

Subtitled "A Memoir of Music and Healing," the book is in part a beautifully written meditation on the composers, teachers and piano pieces Ms. Cutting loves. For the child Linda, music was a bribe: "If I don't talk back or tell anyone what goes on in our house, my father will buy me the piano. There, I can make all the sounds I want … and no one will know it is animal pain coming out as music." By the time the grown-up Linda finds "the words for this pain" she must also find a new path to the music that has always been her mainstay.

Writing Memory Slips was part of that rapprochement; Ms. Cutting even organizes the book musically, with strains of narrative revisited like melodies, in a cyclical rendering. "Time is never strictly chronological in the way it is lived," she writes, and this may be especially true where memory plays such a large part. I was sometimes confused, however, about where we were in time.

Eventually, Ms. Cutting reported her father to the director of pastoral relations at the National Association of Congregational Churches, whose chilling reply was, "At this point, what you are saying is nothing but hearsay." Ms. Cutting's courage will lend great strength to other sufferers whose memories have met with such willful disbelief, for she has built a persuasive indictment with this dignified, eloquent book.