I like a good memoir and I haven’t read one for some time. So, there I was in the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury and looking for what I might buy. Not sure I am really capable of going into a Bookshop and not buying something. Elif Shafak took my eye … and there is a new book out … and of course there was much more including some appealing slender volumes of essays. Waterside Essays looked interesting but it was a memoir by the pianist Stephen Hough that made it to the cash desk. It is called Enough because that is how he explains the pronunciation of his surname, which he apparently frequently has to do. I would automatically assume that Hough was said in that fashion but seemingly Americans usually say How, rhyming with bough. I love Dylan Thomas’s description of the UK and the USA ‘up against the barrier of a common language.’ Our English language! A conglomeration of bits and pieces from all over the world, but Europe in particular.
Anyway, this book was a quick but very enjoyable read. How is a world renowned pianist born out of a thoroughly unmusical family? Are these sorts of immense talents there in the genes or developed by nurture and the environment. Stephen Hough’s story is testament to the former idea. However, his writing of his parents who were obviously hugely supportive in their own way, was very gentle and appealing. After Chethams Music School and the Northern College of Music, Hough won a scholarship which enabled him to study at the Juilliard School in New York. He went there in the early 1980s as a young gay man, yet to ‘come out’ and found himself in the middle of the early panic about AIDS. This is virtually the end of the book and I was quickly looking at the blurb to see if the next volume was available. Yet to be written so it seems. If it appears in a bookshop I will be buying it.