Every Good Boy Does Fine
By Jeremy Denk
- Genre
- Art, Culture & Creative Life
- Publisher
- Random House (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780812995985
Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons is a memoir by the concert pianist Jeremy Denk, published by Random House in March 2022. It recounts his musical training and explains how classical music works. A New York Times bestseller, it was named a best book of 2022 by The New Yorker.
The pianist Jeremy Denk is a MacArthur Fellow known for playing that seems to think out loud, and his memoir does much the same. Every Good Boy Does Fine tells his life as a sequence of music lessons - the eccentric, exasperating, occasionally cruel teachers who shaped him - while doubling as an accessible guide to how classical music actually works. Denk writes about melody, harmony and form with wit and clarity, so that even readers who cannot read a note come to understand what makes a Bach fugue or a Beethoven sonata do what it does. Woven through is a coming-of-age story of family, sexuality and the punishing devotion an artistic life requires. intendle recommends it as a warm, funny, unexpectedly moving book about apprenticeship and love. A New York Times bestseller and a New Yorker best book of 2022, it makes the practice room feel like the center of the world. Rare is the musician who writes this well.