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Books

Sound and fury — the pianist James Rhodes is very angry indeed

Instrumental is an unflinching misery memoir about abuse from early childhood — but James Rhodes’s anger seems equally directed at himself

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music James Rhodes

Canongate, pp.275, £16.99, ISBN: 9781782113379

Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s.

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