SOURCE: "Overture to a Recovery," in The Washington Post Book World, February 2, 1997, p. 5.

[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...