Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music

Music soothes a lifetime of mental illness and psychosexual trauma in Rhodes’s intense memoir. Rhodes, an English concert pianist famous for his classical-music-for-the-masses shows, tells of being raped from the ages of six–10 by a teacher, which eventually led him to heavy drug abuse, obsessive-compulsive tics, a wrecked marriage, a suicide attempt, and commitment to mental institutions. The author tells his story with harrowing realism and even rollicking humor—smoking heroin, he writes, was “the greatest and stupidest thing I’ve ever done”—probing both the everlasting anguished chaos in his head and his own appalling behavior with self-lacerating specificity. Intertwined throughout is the remarkable efflorescence of his musical career—he didn’t start studying piano seriously until his late 20s—and the healing power of music. (He credits a cache of music smuggled into his psych ward by a friend with helping him regain sanity, and he sprinkles in rapturous appreciations of his favorite pieces.) The book trails off at times in self-promotion (Rhodes even plugs his shoe line) and showbiz rants, but Rhodes’s energetic, edgy, painfully perceptive prose makes for a gripping narrative of abuse and dysfunction as well as the quiet, painstaking, redemptive labor of music making. (Feb.)