brendan halpin

I recently saw a clip of Moon Zappa being interviewed about her memoir. I found her funny and charming in the 80’s, but, more importantly, we’re roughly the same age and I too grew up in an unconventional home in the 70’s and 80’s (though my home was Ozzie and Freakin’ Harriet compared to the Zappa household), so I decided to listen to the Audiobook on Spotify. (Which is something you can do, apparently!)

She has a real gift for writing her childhood self. She takes us into her childhood point of view without ever condescending to her childhood self. So the things that were serious and scary and sad to Moon as a kid felt that way to me as I read it. She also does a masterful job of writing about those situations that seem normal to you as a kid that you only later realize were pretty fucked up. So we see how she struggles to reconcile the weird behavior of adults with her total trust in adults and ultimately concludes that everything that seems bad or weird must be her fault.

Her description of attending her father as he died of cancer is brutally honest and beautifully written. Indeed, if you, like me, have lived through a similar scene, you might find this very hard to read because she’s captured the experience perfectly.

And yet, I didn’t finish the book. Because life is messy and chaotic, but the memoirist’s job (in my opinion, and you may disagree) is to bring some order to the chaos of life. To put a frame around part of their life experience and say “this is a story.”

Zappa doesn’t really do this. So—is this a story about a girl with an emotionally and often physically distant father and an emotionally abusive mother who overcomes her difficult childhood? Yes! Is it a story about how having bad parents makes you susceptible to cults? Also yes, though Zappa seems reluctant to call the cult she was in by that name. Is it about the difficulty of being a woman in showbiz, held to impossible, misogynistic beauty standards? That too! Is it about namedropping the celebrities she was friends with/had sex with? Also yes! So lacking any kind of story arc, this is just essentially a collection of vignettes from a woman’s life, and once she’s an adult, it’s just less compelling. Like, okay, you fought with your mom about your wedding dress. You realize that’s a pretty common experience, right? Also the petulant tone she uses when writing about her childhood continues into adulthood and begins to grate after a while.

But then there’s this: this is also a story about money, since their mother left her four children unequal shares of the Zappa estate, and that, apparently, was the impetus for Moon to tell her story. But this is where our introspective, funny, thoughtful narrator just completely fails to read the room. The room in this case being “the overwhelming majority of people reading this book who have also had struggles that included and were exacerbated by money troubles.”

While she does mention that her last name certainly opens doors for her, she later complains about things like, “I really hope this job works out so I don’t have to go back on the family payroll.” Girl. Girrrrrrrrrrl. Lots of people struggle trying to find themselves in their 20’s, and they stick it out in jobs that they hate because they don’t have a family payroll to go back on. And I’m glad for you that you didn’t have to do that, but you have to realize how something like that sounds to a regular person.

Or later, when she complains that her mom hasn’t put any of the houses she bought with the money she got from selling Frank’s catalog in the names of any of her children. Like, yeah, my mom never did that for me either!

There is an interesting point here about how being dependent on the family money means being under the control of a controlling parent even as an adult. But there is never (unless it comes later, after I bailed on the book) a moment in which Moon goes, “Well, what can I give up? What do I really need to live? What do I conceive of as essentials that most people go without?” And so her difficulty finding herself as she bounces from job to job (and presumably to long periods of unemployment) is ultimately annoying.

Ultimately Zappa is a talented enough writer that many readers will probably be carried through by her narrative voice. I’m just not one of them.