In case you are not a Gen Xer with immediate knowledge of all things Moon Unit Zappa, let’s review. The 56-year-old is many things – a writer, actress, mother and yoga teacher, the daughter of avant-garde musician and Rock & 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 is 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 is 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 revelled in flouting convention.
We are 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 mum and dad, and having a painting of an orgy in a home with four children living in it.