The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466805835
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	325 KB

About the Author

Lavinia Greenlaw has published two novels, including Mary George of Allnorthover, which won France's Prix du Premier Roman, and three books of poetry. She lectures at Goldsmiths College and lives in London.

LAVINIA GREENLAW is a novelist and poet. She was once in a band. She lives in London and is a professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

Editorial Reviews

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…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.
—The Washington Post

Chrissie Dickinson

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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Publishers Weekly

A girl's emotional and aesthetic response to music is the chief concern of British novelist and poet Greenlaw's (Mary George of Allnorthover) memoir. This introspective tale of coming of age in and around London-primarily, in rural Essex-in the 1970s conveys the growth and formation of the protagonist's character through her evolving relationship to music in all its forms, from the Sex Pistols to her mother's singing to disco dancing in platform heels, and the insecure, adolescent Greenlaw finally finds understanding in punk music. Greenlaw employs music as a vehicle to invoke childhood experiences and remembrances of time passed. She writes in a poet's prose, and though the pace is slow, what occurs is deeply felt. This title will appeal to music fans as well as all readers interested in coming-of-age stories. Recommended for large public libraries and for women's studies and contemporary music collections in university libraries.
—Katherine Litwin

Library Journal

Coming of age through popular music. British novelist and poet Greenlaw (An Irresponsible Age, 2007, etc.) didn't perform daring feats, conquer cancer, start a business or save anyone; most of her adventures involved sitting in bedrooms listening to records. Nonetheless, her achingly sensitive memoir about trying to grow up through, around and within pop music does not fail to amaze. She presents herself as a young girl bewildered about her place in the world, first as a sensitive child in 1960s London, roiled by hippie and glam crosscurrents, and later as a teenager in a village outside Essex, where her slow ripening coincided with that of the punk movement. During a confusing adolescence, she attempted to fashion a cohesive self through the music she listened to, judiciously acquiring LPs and hungrily listening for furtive signals from the European continent on a little transistor radio. At 14, a pivotal age in her musical autobiography, she exulted in punk style, especially its collapsed gender distinctions. Fortunately, her tolerant, seemingly disinterested parents granted her the freedom (and presumably the funds) to pursue this temporary rebellion, with all its attendant dangers and delights. As the Chi-Lites gave way to the Sex Pistols, Devo and the Damned, she sought but could not regain the easy camaraderie of dancing at the disco with her girlfriends. Though decidedly personal, her story will resonate with those who, like the author, experienced firsthand the sea changes of popular music in the '70s, as well was with those who discovered the era's gems later. The taut, lyric thrum of Greenlaw's prose reflects her poet's skill. Introducing each chapter with epigraphs selectedwith care from great works of Western literature, she weaves her quietly intense tale into a much larger narrative. Well-written, bewitching and subtly dazzling. Agent: Derek Johns/AP Watt

Kirkus Reviews

Has the precision and intensity of prose poetry . . . brilliantly traces the shaping of a rich, complex self.” —Chicago Tribune

“A brief, masterful memoir.” —The New Yorker

“Exhilarating . . . perfectly evokes the sense of release and rebellion of a teenage girl driving through the countryside with boyfriends, blasting heavy metal on the car radio. . . . An amazing feat of inventiveness.” —Salon.com

“Greenlaw brings her youth to life in this book. . . . Readers will hear the accompanying sound track wafting off the pages.” —The Washington Post

“Highly original . . . will resonate with everyone who has ever danced around a handbag or played air guitar.” —Daily Mail (UK)

“Highly original . . . I've never read anything like it.” —The Buffalo News

“adorable...poignantly musing...and genuinely rueful.” —The Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher