SOURCE: "Fugue State," in New York Times Book Review, February 9, 1997, p. 18.

[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...