Four of this spring’s most exciting memoirs

L-R: COURTESY OF KNOPF; COURTESY OF PENGUIN PRESS; COURTESY OF HARPER; COURTESY OF RIZZOLI

This spring brings a bounty of memoirs from larger-than-life artists and personalities. The award-winning musical theater maestro Andrew Lloyd Webber pulls back the curtain on his five decades as the reigning king of Broadway in Unmasked; musician and artist Laurie Anderson reflects on her groundbreaking 40 years of storytelling through words and images in All the Things I Lost in the Flood; Ian Buruma recalls his film school days hanging out in the 1970s Tokyo art world in A Tokyo Romance; and in Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies, the figurative painter Duncan Hannah takes us back to his helter–skelter early years in New York City. Just as Grizabella, the washed–up feline starlet in Webber’s 1981 musical Cats famously sang: “Let the memory live again!”