Songs of Herself

A memoir of a childhood con brio.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC TO GIRLS

By Lavinia Greenlaw

Farrar Straus Giroux. 208 pp. $23

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 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 co-exist 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.