In Moon Unit, Zappa's memoirs, fame and family trauma collide

One night in 1979, 11-year-old Moon Unit Zappa falls asleep while his parents are arguing. They argue a lot, so this isn’t unusual. His father, Frank, is a musician and composer with a complex, convoluted aural style and a seemingly insatiable appetite for bedding his fans. His mother, Gail, helps him run his business, and the two often butt heads over money, other women, or both.

But on that particular night, things spiral out of control. And after a few hours of sleep, as Zappa recalls in his new memoir, “Earth to Moon,” she is awakened by her father standing over her bed and saying, “Gail is furious. I need you to hide the gun.”

The girl's little sister is sleeping in her crib in the same room, and her two younger brothers are also in bed. She had no idea the family had a gun, let alone where it might be hidden. But she sets out on a panicked midnight search for a firearm that may or may not have existed; she never ends up finding it. Fortunately, her mother doesn't find it either.

These kinds of harrowing details populate the opening pages of Zappa’s book, which features plenty of parental neglect — “My feet are just starting to heal from the time two women were supposed to take care of me and my feet got burned by the radiator,” she recalls of an episode when she was about 4 — as well as outright abuse, including a story about her mother handcuffing her to her younger brother Dweezil and forcing them to listen to a recording of her own crying.

Perhaps the most telling observation about the Zappa family’s particular dysfunction comes in the form of a brief remark that only Frank’s presence could stop his young sons from fighting. “Stopping is the only solution because you can’t take up too much of his time,” he writes, making it abundantly clear that the man’s sons were trained to understand that his music was always his first priority.

It is no surprise, then, that Zappa seeks her father's attention by offering to sing on one of his records. The resulting collaboration, “Valley Girl,” becomes a breakthrough hit that catapults her out of her father's shadow and into a brief period of pop stardom at the age of 14.

“Earth to Moon” is a Hollywood book through and through, packed with stories of famous people Zappa encounters throughout her life, like microwaved gas station burritos during high school lunches with Janet Jackson. But once “Valley Girl” is published, in 1982, the memoir begins to lose its punch and candor. Zappa paints a harrowing portrait of the childhood that shaped her, but is less specific and present as her story moves into adolescence and adulthood and she tries to figure out how to deal with her trauma.

“From the Earth to the Moon” is drawn from the author’s journals, and at times it seems more like a transcription than a transformation of that material. For example, after a teenage Zappa gleefully tells the story of the handcuff incident to a talk show host, the host informs him during a commercial break that it’s not a cute story; it’s child abuse. Zappa writes that at that moment he hears “a siren that makes everyone go into overdrive” inside himself. But the book doesn’t address the effects of that revelation further.

The chapter immediately moves on to the following: “Then I heard that Van Halen had broken up and disbanded… The world felt totally turned upside down. If this incredible band can’t stay together, how can anything function?” The next time we see Zappa, it’s a year later, and she’s working as an MTV presenter in New York.

The gaps and ellipses grow larger as the book moves toward its conclusion. The introduction to “From the Earth to the Moon” contains lessons Zappa has learned along the way, offering koans like “The way out is through her. Make peace with what hurts and move toward joy.” But he never shows how or when he learned them.

Zappa Lunar Unit

(Randall Slavin)

Zappa's father died of cancer at age 52 in 1993, after which his mother took control of his estate. When she died in 2015, Expel Moon and one of his brothers from the family business.They receive money but have no control over their father's name or the right to use it in their work.

It’s hard not to read “From the Earth to the Moon” as Zappa’s attempt to resist that erasure, to claim her place in her family’s story and to insist on her right to tell her side of it. It’s a noble project, but an incomplete reading experience. Ultimately, “From the Earth to the Moon” feels less like a book than a plea from that wounded little girl, still searching for someone to see her and acknowledge that she’s hurting.

Zan Romanoff is a writer and author of several young adult novels.