The Importance of Music to Girls

By Lavinia Greenlaw
224 pp. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008 $23.00

Reviewed by Celene Carillo

Lavinia Greenlaw’s “The Importance of Music to Girls” is less a fan’s memoir of the music she loves than it is a coming of age story about the agonies and sporadic joys of being a teenager. Music, despite the title, is not the centerpiece of Greenlaw’s story. Music is instead an elaborate and sometimes beautiful backdrop, just like clothes, England, style and boys are. The distance between the title and the book is frustrating, as Greenlaw’s short vignettes (which are intense bursts, like a series of songs) never seem to reach an arc or follow a distinct narrative path. That we never quite know who she is, however, is the real story, and Greenlaw nails middle-class, adolescent angst. Hers is a story for anyone who has experienced the painful process of self-realization and fitting in (or not). And it’ll help to know who Ian Curtis was. And the Buzzcocks. And Devo. 

Life got hard for Greenlaw when her parents, both doctors, moved the family from London to the village of Essex as she was about to start secondary school. “I was usually bewildered, and often terrified. The world, which had begun to fall into place, unanchored and distorted. I, too, shrank and veered, and felt in any given situation that I was wrong,” she writes. Unmoored, Greenlaw found a few friends and began to try on different identities – disco girl, hippie, punk – and music and clothes were the vehicles by which to achieve them. Most of them don’t stick, though. Alienated and traumatized by a friend’s suicide attempt, a 13-year-old Greenlaw loses the exuberance that had propelled her to disco clubs in four-inch heels. She tosses that identity away, as well as the desire to fit in with the group, writing, “If someone found Marvin Gaye or the Chi-Lites in my room they would discover something terrible about me. But what? And what was I going to listen to now?”

“The Importance of Music’s” structure can be confusing and abrupt – Greenlaw at one point delivers a chapter on punk, following it with a chapter on hitching a ride from a Uriah Heep rock concert and switching yet again to punk. Important details, like her family’s eventual breakup when her father leaves the house, are introduced and disappear within a couple of sentences. 

Still, Greenlaw hits strides throughout the book, especially toward her later teenage years, as if she’s emerging as a fully formed person – and connoisseur of music. Her language throughout is engaging and evocative – Greenlaw is a poet, after all. Her keen understanding of her truant, naïve, neurotic teenage self, though, is the book’s strongest attribute. Greenlaw describes attending the Rock Against Racism carnival in London in April 1978: “We felt part of something powerful and, because we all knew the words, something fantastically simple, too. I could not really conceive of nuclear war any more than I believed that as we marched through London we were actually spreading love and peace,” she writes.

It’s Greenlaw’s perspectives that make the confusion of youth, as well as “The Importance of Music” seem worthwhile.