An engrossing and frank coming-of-age memoir from one of the world's
leading pianists.
"Stephen Hough's memoir had me gripped from the beginning [ ...]
riveting and revelatory. Most memoirs give me far more than I want to
know - this is the rare sort that left me urgently demanding a second
volume, a third, a fourth. I loved it." -- Philip Pullman
Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world's leading pianists,
winning global acclaim and numerous awards.
This memoir recounts his unconventional coming-of-age story, from his
beginnings in an unmusical home in Cheshireto the main stage of Carnegie
Hall in New York aged 21. We read of his early love-affair with the
piano which curdled, after a teenage nervous breakdown, into failure at
school and six-hours a day watching television, engulfed in dreams,
seesawing between sexual and religious obsessions.We meet his
supportive, if eccentric parents - his artistically frustrated father,
his housework-hating mother. We read of the teachers who encouraged and
inspired, and others who hit him on the head screaming, "you'll do
nothing with your life". Then finding his way back to the piano, having
abandoned plans for an alternative life as a Catholic priest, he
flourished at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Juilliard
School, beginning his career as an international soloist as this book
ends.
