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.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Whether we purposely choose a soundtrack for our days, or whether a tune just drifts through a window like a dream, music has the power to weave itself into the fabric of our lives. For the British poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw, it's the connective thread in "The Importance of Music to Girls," her coming-of-age memoir. Music — sometimes just burbling distantly in the background, sometimes cranked... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to the highest volume — is a constant in her often bumpy journey through adolescence.

The daughter of two sensible doctors and the sister to three boisterous siblings, Greenlaw begins her story in early childhood. She recalls listening to her mother quietly singing "Greensleeves" and "Scarborough Fair," and being transfixed by her father's handful of vinyl records, in particular Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline." These musical memories coexist with recollections of fierce sibling squabbles told in funny, if gory, detail. Eight years old in 1970, Greenlaw pondered the distant creatures known as teenagers that she saw in the streets of London, from earth-toned hippies to flashy glam-rockers. She tumbled through brief infatuations with American teen idols Donny Osmond and David Cassidy.

At 11, her world shifted when the family relocated to a rural Essex village. Greenlaw chronicles the culture shock with precision. School was a trial for this pale, skinny interloper who was mocked for her name and posh voice. When music crops up in the narrative, Greenlaw captures the weird ways that certain songs embed themselves into our memories. She remembers the "helium way" people sang along to David Bowie's "Laughing Gnome" at a school dance. Suffering through an abscessed tooth during a school trip, she nonetheless shouted along to the novelty hit "The Streak" as a way to belong.

Life in the village proved an odd mix of music and dance, from the trumpet and drum of the Armistice Day parade to the carol singers who came to her door in December. She banged away on the piano and attempted the violin. The author nails the pubescent angst of being trapped between childhood and adulthood: "I was stuck in march time, pounding out surplus energy." Her parents gave her a transistor radio, a lifeline to the outside world. "Radio was no longer background noise," she observes. "I practically sat and watched it." She graduated quickly from "Top of the Pops" to the obscure allure of foreign stations and pirate radio, her search for new, unheard music taking on the obsessiveness of the true music geek.

Adolescence hit and hormones raged. She awkwardly negotiated the problem of boys and the bewildering intricacies of sexual attraction. She became a "disco girl" in makeup, heels and hairspray.

The shellac of disco gave way to the homemade haircuts of punk. The unbridled genre hit Greenlaw with galvanic force. "Punk didn't just change what I listened to and how I dressed," she writes. "It altered my aesthetic sense completely." Everything was suddenly different and more serious, be it boys, bands or her shaky realization that childhood was ending and an unknowable future stretched ahead.

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. But the book bogs down when she adopts a tone more suitable to a thesis than a memoir. "The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilizing tritone," she writes in a trying chapter on the Broadway musical "West Side Story." Such passages might be manna for music theorists, but a more casual reader may feel compelled to stifle a yawn. Thankfully such academic jargon is largely restricted to the book's earlier pages. As this memoir advances, Greenlaw's insights become more earthy.

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.

Chrissie Dickinson is a writer and musician based in Chicago.

Reviewed by Chrissie Dickinson, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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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. She has written a razor-sharp remembrance of adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes at the most visceral level.

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.