From daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, Moon Unit Zappa, comes a Memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age as part of the MTV generation in the 1980s as the Valley Girl, and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the fracturing of her longest relationships.
For Moon Unit Zappa, processing a life so unique, so punctuated by the whims of creative genius, the tastes of popular culture, the calculus of celebrity and the nature of fractured love has at times been eviscerating, at ot.
Rightly or wrongly, I believed I would never be as good as my dad, so I had to learn to live with plain old me.
I had no choice.
And in life.
As time went on, I loosened the reins on my dad-comparing and perfectionism in my journals.
When I still lived at home and had no privacy, I\'d write in code about really secret stuff so I had somewhere safe to be the real me, to vent about my feelings with impunity.
I wish my dad would take me with him to Europe.
I used my journals like a secret best friend I could tell anything to: I\'m sad.
I was boy crazy for Shawn Cassidy and wrote his name everywhere, followed by pages of scrawling my new name Moon Unit Cassidy in loopy cursive.
I was complimentary and wrote a letter to Tina Turner to let her know she is almost as good a dancer as me.
I was ambitious and practiced signing my autograph in various handwriting styles.
I was political and wrote a letter to President Ford to get him to stop men from clubbing baby harp seals.
When I wasn\'t writing short stories about my camels T\'mershi Duween and Sinini, or about aliens or ballerinas or nuns, or alien ballerina nuns, I\'d report on the happenings in the house or the world at large.
Plus, the diaries were from Gail and Frank, my mother and my father, with the inscription to me in his handwriting, so I put undue pressure on myself to turn these blank nothings into weighty somethings, as I saw my idol dad doing on his large, butter-colored music paper.
I believed I had a responsibility to do excellent work in them, to match their external beauty and honor the dead trees I held in my hands, a concept my mother had recently illuminated along with explaining hamburgers were deceased cows.
These books felt important.
So fancy.
They were hardbound in black leather with gold embellishments on the cover and along the paper edges.
I got my first journal when I was five, for Christmas, then every year after I\'d get a new one.
From daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, Moon Unit Zappa, comes a Memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age as part of the MTV generation in the 1980s as the Valley Girl, and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the fracturing of her longest relationships
