Customer Reviews

The Importance of Music to Girls

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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.

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.

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

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.

'The Importance of Music to Girls' is an insight into growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in the UK, from the perspective of a girl to whom music meant everything. It is an interesting read and more than just a memoir; more of a social history book. I would recommend it to anyone who has ever loved music above all else.

When I looked at the inner-flap of this book, I was immediately intruigued and picked this up, I mean what is (potentially) not to like about a memoir on growing up with music.

In "The Importance of Music to Girls" (208 pages), author Lavinia Greenlaw brings her recollections of what it was like growing up with music, and how it shaped and influenced her, in the 1960-1970s of her native England. The book takes a while to find its groove, but when it does so, about one-third into it, it all really clicks, and from there on it became an engrossing read, and treat, for me, particulary since it appears the author differs only 2 years or so from me (I grew up in Belgium). So many of the music names and memories that she retells in turn brought back memories for me I hadn't thought of in a LONG time. Along the way there are the usual boy/girl and school adventures and problems, but it is a sidebar for me as I was reading the book.

Here just a couple of snippets that made me chuckle: about listening to the radio as a teenager: "From Radio Luxembourg, I moved on to pirate station Radio Caroline. It was illegal, and broadcast from a boat just out there off the Essex coast. Its DJs never sounded silly or romantic, and rarely cheerful. They were improvisatory, and they never played the usual chart hits." About appreciating music: "Until now I hadn't given much thought to producers. I'd heard of Phil Spector and his "Wall of Sound" and admired Quincy Jones, but didn't understand what they did. Then I read about Martin Hennet and saw his names on records by Joy Division, the Buzzcocks and Magazine. I began to listen differently, like someone who has grasped prosody reads a poem differently".

In all, I really connected with this book, and would recommend it to anyone who grew up with music being an important aspect of their life. In that sense, the title of the book is really deficient, in that this is not just "for girls".