The Importance of Music to Girls [Hardcover]

Lavinia Greenlaw (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2008

The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into—how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it’s there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first.

For Greenlaw, music—from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock—is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that, a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. School reports and diary entries reveal the girl behind them searching for an identity through the sounds that compelled her generation. Crushing on Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels and sparkly eye shadow, being mesmerized by Joy Division’s suicidally brilliant Ian Curtis—Greenlaw has written a razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes us at the most visceral level of all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In her first memoir, British novelist and poet Greenlaw (Mary George of Allnorthover) tells of coming to know the world and her place in it through her love of music. The story begins as she first awakens to her inchoate senses, a tiny child waltzing with her father, lulled by her mother's singing and clamoring amid the boisterous play of her three siblings and the entire family's constant chatter. She discovers that outside her home, the world is a series of social rings she must struggle to break into, from joining Ring-a-ring o' Roses games to finding a sense of belonging as a plainly English girl in a culturally diverse school. Growing up in the late 1960s and '70s, she's captivated by her transistor radio and the shifts in pop culture that it heralds, from hippie music to glam rock to disco. As she matures, she swears her allegiance to the latter, moving en masse with primping and dancing girlfriends. She then turns to punk, which neutralized and released her from the weight of femininity, and then to new wave, which suited her seriousness and pretensions. Her punk sensibilities confuse her sense of how to love and be loved, how to have feelings without ironizing them too. Greenlaw's coming-of-age story is smartly and tenderly told, likely to snag readers like an infectiously catchy tune. (May)
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Review

"Lavinia Greenlaw's memoir is like none I've ever read—it unravels identity like a novel. It is as spritely and as curious as an essay. Like music, it honors silence as much as it does sound. Greenlaw, a gifted mix-master of forms, has composed a coming-of-age experience that rings magically true for all of us."  —Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment

“Highly original . . . Beautiful . . . Will resonate with everyone who has ever danced around a handbag or played air guitar.”  —Daily Mail

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 205 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374174547
• ISBN-13: 978-0374174545
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,717,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars F*** art, let's dance., June 26, 2008

By 

T. A. Glickman (FL, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Importance of Music to Girls (Hardcover)

The Importance of Music to Girls, by Lavinia Greenlaw is a memoir not so much of childhood and adolescence, but of her developing relationship with music in 1970s Britain.

There are plenty of reviews out there, and they're generally mixed. The Importance of Music to Girls made Salon.com's Summer Reads; but was skewered in London's The Independent. My reflections do not diverge much from this farraginous example. I had a dickens of a time maintaining my interest at the outset of the memoir. I'm not sure if that's entirely Greenlaw's fault or my own. Her storytelling certainly became more clear, coherent and less ethereal as her remembered-self ages. The book is divided into more than fifty chapters; constituent essays on a theme. Each essay is prefaced by a quote, some more esoteric ("very good") than others. Part of me wonders whether she meant them ironically (Roland Barthes? Bullfinch's Mythology?), or if that was the effect of having read her teenage-punk self's preoccupation with irony in the latter portion of the book.

A creative writing professor and poet, Greenlaw is very much a writer I would like to know more about. So, I read her slender memoir with a critical eye towards form and function. Effect was lovely if not muted, which surprised me. For one having written a memoir about her journey through the landscape of dance hall discos and London punk, Greenlaw's tone is surprisingly subdued. I understand, from a writer's perspective, the urge to not draw the world too deeply into the wounds, scars, and dissymmetries of one's experience. Alternately, perhaps she wished to exude the post-modern detachment she experienced as a confused adolescent who depended so heavily on album cover art to interpret which mode of femininity was acceptable. But with a title that makes such a sweeping statement that promises, de facto, to give a glimpse into, well, the importance of music to girls, I found myself wanting the words which may help me access the synaesthesia, angst, and release, and acceptance Greenlaw experienced through music. Perhaps no words can fit that bill.

Her writing is beautiful, though. Despite the failures of the The Importance of Music to Girls, I enjoyed reading it. And, I learned something stylistically. At the end of the day, that's enough for me.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Muted Poetry, July 10, 2009

By 

W. A. Emerson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Importance of Music to Girls (Hardcover)

I agree with Reviewer Glickman. The poet in Lavinia Greenlaw comes through loud and clear in passages that aren't quite fleshed out. I came in expecting total metamorphosis, but Greenlaw seems to stay 15 for the majority of the novel and then, the clincher, the light at the end of the tunnel - Greenlaw's eventual happiness, her "forming of the self" is skipped as the novel jumps ahead to seven years later when the authoress has just had her first child. At this I was sorely disappointed. Further, we never get a sense of the author's anguish, more of her detachment, the best example being in the recountment of going to a Vibrators gig, where she focuses not one lick on the band onstage but on the trashbag-wearing audience members. So, she wanders around for a bit absentmindedly. She tells us that she "falls in love", but that seemingly momentous event is painted in similarly blurry brushstrokes, never quite touching on the electrifying emotional core that the reader craves.

The highlights of the book are in Greenlaw's mini tone-poem-istic passages (waltzing on the feet of her father, driving fast in cars with boys through the Essex countryside to the sounds of Led Zeppelin, smoking pot and listening to Earth, Wind and Fire) - I always look for authors who can create new and unique images in my mind, and Lavinia Greenlaw is most definitely able. Her images, though, are too smart, hip, detached for their own good. Avoiding hyperbole and instead opting for haiku-like details and a university professor's critical eye, her prose tends to fall short of anything resembling catharsis. To use a drug analogy, the reader feels like he or she swallowed a couple ambiens and is observing all events transpire through the ponderous, detached, dry-mouthed and slightly disorienting lens of a dreamworld. Her other strength lies in her postmodern (for lack of a better word - groan) experiments with the medium - such as including excerpts from a bomb-protection manual, creative use of footnotes, interjecting prose with artifactual lists, schedules, and quotations. These serve to add humor and historical context to the work.

In the end though, she is unable to connect the reader to the emotional spheres she seems to want to take us to. Instead of reaching Planet Ecstasy - or Planet Despair - we pass right by it, noses pressed against the window dolefully. The book feels incomplete, as if it was hastily jotted down and then sent off to the publisher (which may be the case). I, personally, found it was quite a slog to get through, especially for such a short book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Selfhelp it's not, January 27, 2011

By 

Simon G. Barrett (london, england) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Importance of Music to Girls (Paperback)

Glad this made it across the Atlantic. I think if you come to it without preconceptions, at the very least you'll be pleasurably surprised; I rate it scarcely inferior to Carrie Jones's Cutting up Playgirl for its disarming, jaw-dropping honesty. Moving slightly sideways, there's Jenny Diski's What I don't know about animals, which doesn't seem to have made it over there yet, but check her out