Geddy Lee’s Upcoming Memoir Helped Him Cope With Neil Peart’s Death

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After years of anticipation, Geddy Lee will release a memoir slated for fall 2022.

In an Instagram post, the bassist explained that the idea for a memoir came from his lockdown in Toronto during the pandemic —  the longest he’d ever spent there since he was 19 and playing the Northern Ontario bar circuit with Rush.

“There were some shiny silver linings to be found at home: teaching my grandson the finer points of baseball and birdwatching, tending to my pups (one of whom was quite ill) and spending the evenings with my lovely better half, glass of Armagnac in hand, as we watched every European mystery show ever produced,” he wrote. “Oh, and another thing: I began to write. Words, that is.”

Lee also admitted that the memoir helped him grieve the death of his bandmate Neil Peart, who died months before the pandemic in January 2020. “My friend and collaborator on the Big Beautiful Book of Bass, Daniel Richler, saw how I was struggling in the aftermath of Neil’s passing, and tried coaxing me out of my blues with some funny tales from his youth, daring me to share my own in return,” he wrote. “So I did — reluctantly at first, but then remembering, oh yeah, I like wrestling with words.”

The memoir, currently untitled, will be out in the fall of 2022. He recently appeared on Dave Grohl and his mother Virginia Hanlon’s series From Cradle to Stage, where he spoke about growing up the son of Holocaust survivors with his late mother, Mary Weinrib.

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