The Importance of Music to Girls (Hardcover)

by Lavinia Greenlaw (Author)
Key Phrases: Lavinia Greenlaw, Ian Curtis, Joy Division (more...)

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Chrissie Dickinson

Whether we purposely choose a soundtrack for our days, or whether a tune just drifts through a window like a dream, music has the power to weave itself into the fabric of our lives. For the British poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw, it's the connective thread in The Importance of Music to Girls, her coming-of-age memoir. Music -- sometimes just burbling distantly in the background, sometimes cranked to the highest volume -- is a constant in her often bumpy journey through adolescence.

The daughter of two sensible doctors and the sister to three boisterous siblings, Greenlaw begins her story in early childhood. She recalls listening to her mother quietly singing "Greensleeves" and "Scarborough Fair," and being transfixed by her father's handful of vinyl records, in particular Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline." These musical memories co-exist with recollections of fierce sibling squabbles told in funny, if gory, detail. Eight years old in 1970, Greenlaw pondered the distant creatures known as teenagers that she saw in the streets of London, from earth-toned hippies to flashy glam-rockers. She tumbled through brief infatuations with American teen idols Donny Osmond and David Cassidy.

At 11, her world shifted when the family relocated to a rural Essex village. Greenlaw chronicles the culture shock with precision. School was a trial for this pale, skinny interloper who was mocked for her name and posh voice. When music crops up in the narrative, Greenlaw captures the weird ways that certain songs embed themselves into our memories. She remembers the "helium way" people sang along to David Bowie's "Laughing Gnome" at a school dance. Suffering through an abscessed tooth during a school trip, she nonetheless shouted along to the novelty hit "The Streak" as a way to belong.

Life in the village proved an odd mix of music and dance, from the trumpet and drum of the Armistice Day parade to the carol singers who came to her door in December. She banged away on the piano and attempted the violin. The author nails the pubescent angst of being trapped between childhood and adulthood: "I was stuck in march time, pounding out surplus energy." Her parents gave her a transistor radio, a lifeline to the outside world. "Radio was no longer background noise," she observes. "I practically sat and watched it." She graduated quickly from "Top of the Pops" to the obscure allure of foreign stations and pirate radio, her search for new, unheard music taking on the obsessiveness of the true music geek.

Adolescence hit and hormones raged. She awkwardly negotiated the problem of boys and the bewildering intricacies of sexual attraction. She became a "disco girl" in makeup, heels and hairspray.

The shellac of disco gave way to the homemade haircuts of punk. The unbridled genre hit Greenlaw with galvanic force. "Punk didn't just change what I listened to and how I dressed," she writes. "It altered my aesthetic sense completely." Everything was suddenly different and more serious, be it boys, bands or her shaky realization that childhood was ending and an unknowable future stretched ahead.

Greenlaw is a lovely prose stylist and displays a wide-ranging intellect. She's just as likely to launch into a meditation on the myth of Persephone as she is to discuss the impact a Buzzcocks single had on punk. But the book bogs down when she adopts a tone more suitable to a thesis than a memoir. "The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilizing tritone," she writes in a trying chapter on the Broadway musical "West Side Story." Such passages might be manna for music theorists, but a more casual reader may feel compelled to stifle a yawn. Thankfully such academic jargon is largely restricted to the book's earlier pages. As this memoir advances, Greenlaw's insights become more earthy.

Greenlaw brings her youth to life in this book. And whether it's madrigal singers rehearsing in the living room or metal blasting from the radio in a car full of partying teenagers, readers will hear the accompanying soundtrack wafting off the pages.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #704,813 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	T. A. Glickman (Ponce Inlet, FL, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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

By	W. A. Emerson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Read, Good Inspiration, May 29, 2009

By	S. Lake "amy lake- bunnygarage channel" (Jamestown NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an interesting little book,
a quick read, and it will inspire you
to explore your own life through the
music you've known throughout your life.