In Geddy Lee’s memoir, family is the constant refrain

Geddy Lee’s memoir, “My Effin’ Life,” has the distinction of being the season’s only memoir by a famous author that is not at its best in audio form. No offense to the Canadian rocker; his 16- hour- and- 20- minute narration is heroic. But if you take the aural route, you’ll miss the class pictures, family photos and backstage shots ( that ’ 70s hair!) sprinkled through the pages. Lee even includes his bar mitzvah invitation, captioned with a gentle dig at his mother for using the wrong middle name.

The book’s most moving and memorable sections grow out of these artifacts, including a photo that came from a fan who learned that Lee was piecing together his parents’ harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. With the help of From Numbers to Names, a website that uses A. I. to search photo and video archives, he located several snapshots of Lee’s relatives in a displaced persons camp at Bergen- Belsen.

“I was in awe,” Lee said in a phone interview, describing the sight of those familiar faces in unimaginable circumstances. “I’d grown up with all these stories that my mother had passed on to us, but not all the boxes had been checked in a way that made chronological sense.”

In 1995, Lee accompanied his mother, Mary Weinrib, to Germany — and then to Poland, where she was born — for a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen- Belsen. In the middle of a rubber- chicken lunch at the sanitized, modern incarnation of the death camp, Lee’s mother had an announcement for her adult children: They were sitting in the room where, 49 years before, she’d married their father, Morris Weinrib, who died when Lee was 12. ( Another powerful visual in Lee’s memoir: his mother’s handwritten list of the seven camps his father survived.)

“She just turned to us and said, yes, this was the room,” Lee said. “And then while she was talking, a woman across from her asked her name. It turned out, not only did they know each other from the camp, but they were in the same barrack when they were liberated.”

For 25 years, Lee felt guilty as recordings from that trip languished in a drawer. Finally, not long before his mother died, he turned to them in the early months of the pandemic. From there, the book grew out of a series of emails with Daniel Richler, who became Lee’s collaborator. It was an intense project, to say the least.

“I could feel the clock ticking,” Lee said. “I needed to get it down and I needed to get it right. For my kids and for my grandchildren and their children, so there would be an accurate record of how lucky we are to be here on the planet. How close we came to not being here.”