In case you’re not a Gen Xer with immediate knowledge of all things Moon Unit Zappa, let’s review: The 56-year-old Angeleno is many things – a writer, actor, mother and yoga teacher, who also happens to be the daughter of avant-garde musician and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Frank Zappa, and the voice of his only Top 40 commercial hit, “Valley Girl.”
More than 20 years ago, Zappa made her first attempt at publishing a book about “how difficult it is to be hippie royalty AND try to find your own identity in the shadow of a certifiable self-made ‘genius.’ “
That’s a line from her 2001 novel, “America the Beautiful,” but it also works as a good summation of her latest book, the memoir “Earth to Moon.”
It’s a bare-knuckled, funny and often poignant nonfiction account of what it meant to grow up in a celebrity home in the ‘70s with “pagan absurdist” parents Frank and Gail, who reveled in flouting convention. We’re talking about having one of your dad’s many groupies living in the basement, calling your parents by their first names because they rejected the labels of mom and dad, and having a painting of an orgy as decor for a home with four children living in it.
“My nanny was a Ouija board,” Zappa quipped. “You shouldn’t know who [occultist] Aleister Crowley is at 5 years old.”
Her parents selected her first and middle names to seal her destiny: “Frank gave Gail two choices, Moon or Motorhead. Motorhead was a member of his band, so Gail selected Moon, and Unit was because I was the firstborn and we became a family unit. And so from the time I was very small, I really lived up to my name being this thing that was circumnavigating my father, the sun.”
Anyway, back to that first book. Why did she wait more than two decades to take another stab at publishing?
There are practical reasons, like the fact that she became a mother and was busy raising a child, and that she professes to have “a very hermit-like personality. I’m a very private person.”
But there’s more to it than that.
“I was also really traumatized by writing the first book,” Zappa said during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I put all this time into working on it, like five years, and then it came out on September 11 [of 2001]. So all of that work was just gone in a Pompeii moment. I knew it wasn’t personal, but it was, still, just a shock that I could put that much effort into something, and it just could be like, poof! Gone.
“Growing up in Los Angeles and in the Hollywood scene, the legend here is that if you finally do your piece just the way you want to do it, all doors open. And it just…didn’t happen.”
Granted, that legend — better called a myth — didn’t factor in a terrorist attack that killed thousands and threw the world into chaos. It didn’t help that the book was called ‘America the Beautiful” when, she says, “America had changed. [The novel] was a girly summer read, and the world was like, ‘We’re going after people. We don’t lay at the beach anymore.”
The novelized attempt at telling her story aside, with “Earth to Moon,” Zappa seems to have matured to the point where she can grapple with her complicated history, no holds barred.
“Yeah, no, thank you for pointing that out,” Zappa said. “It was just too painful to tell it in a nonfiction way when I was younger. So I got creative. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just make this like a hodge-podge of events and then fictionalize things and throw in some hilarity. But it was just thinking, ‘How do I want to tell a story so that it is palatable, that some of these experiences are not so painful for the reader?’”
But then, as Zappa details in her memoir, as the years wore on, she experienced a series of painful betrayals orchestrated by her mother Gail, whom she cared for during the end stages of her battle with lung cancer. Gail died in 2015.
“Gail did many things…All the adorable, ‘It’s my family’ stuff just went away, and I was stripped bare. I was, like, ‘I have to write nonfiction to save my life.’
“I had to think about what family is, what trust is, what loyalty is, what promises are.”
In wrestling her story to the page, she also had trouble going back to the period of time in the ‘80s that made her into a pop culture touchstone — so much so that the first draft of her memoir she turned in to her publisher didn’t include anything about the making of the hit song “Valley Girl.”
“I had a real blind spot about this time in my life. I’m not even joking,” she said. “It’s hilarious. I literally turned in my memoir with no mention of ‘Valley Girl.’ And so, obviously, they said, ‘You’re missing a couple of stories…’
“[Those were] some of the last pieces that I wrote, because I just didn’t realize how much energy, discomfort and pain was around that particular time. I guess I just wasn’t ready to really roll my sleeves up and look at it. So that took a minute.”
Zappa remembers the feeling of competing for her famous father’s attention not just within the family, but with the world at large.
“I was so desperate for my father’s attention because when he shined his light on you, you felt like you were the only person in the room,” said Zappa.
Then she “figured out the secret formula” for spending time with him: He loved working — recording and performing music.
“I slipped a note under his studio door” proposing they do a song together, she recalled.
“And so he took me up on the offer. On a school night, he woke me up. He said, ‘Do that funny voice that you do,’ because I was going to school in the [San Fernando] Valley, and the girls had this lovely lyrical cadence that just was hilarious to me. And so we recorded a few tracks.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
The popularity of the song, which also inspired the 1983 movie “Valley Girl,” opened up a few acting roles for Zappa. “I wanted to be an actress like Cher, like Carol Burnett. I love those variety style shows and those little vignettes.”
She wanted to be good at the craft of acting, so she began taking lessons — which, in a surprise plot twist, you could say led to her penning two books and numerous articles for magazines.
“I was thinking, ‘OK, I want to have craft here,’ and one teacher in particular, Roy London, was just this an unbelievable teacher. He really saw me journaling and in the class taking feverish notes. He just turned to me and he said, ‘Moon, you’re a writer.’”
To see the recording of this interview with Moon Zappa, sign up here for the Sept. 20 episode of Bookish, the Southern California News Group’s virtual program on authors. Also on the September episode is Garth Greenwell talking about his new novel “Small Rain.”
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