BRATTLEBORO — Moon Unit Zappa paused to collect herself as she read a passage from her new memoir, “Earth to Moon,” at the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Moon Unit, daughter of Frank and Gail Zappa, got choked up reading how her mother “found a sun-drenched, two-bedroom, ranch-style fixer-upper in the windy hills above Laurel Canyon under canopies of eucalyptus, pine, royal palm, and Chinese elm.”
“Do either of them have an inkling this will be their forever home?” she read at the event at The Stone Church, where tribute bands featuring past Zappa alumni have performed. “Do they realize that together they will plant roots and claim victory over childhood upheaval? That here my father will do the difficult, solo, quiet, internal work necessary to transcend his potential, cementing his stratospheric talents for the ages? That here they will raise and divide a family and breathe their last breaths?”
After reading some excerpts from her book, Moon Unit answered questions from the floor. The Stone Church was packed with people interested in her story and musings.
All her life, Moon Unit had been asked what it was like growing up with Frank Zappa as her father. She said she always felt like it was Gail’s “story to tell because she was the adult opposite my father, and she knew all the references and knew about the gear and that sort of thing.”
Moon Unit said she encouraged Gail to write about the family history, but she died in 2015 and left all the intellectual property to her two younger siblings Diva and Ahmet, who she helped raise. Moon Unit and her brother Dweezil could have nothing to do with the property, which Moon Unit described as a surprising development.
“She also put in the will that if any of us found God, we wouldn’t even get what we were given,” Moon Unit said. “So, bit of a curve ball. And so I honestly thought I have to write this to save my own life and just be like, Who are these people?”
Moon Unit said the song “Valley Girl,” which she wrote and recorded with her father, had been inspired by conversations she overheard growing up in Laurel Canyon. She found the way girls were talking had a lyrical and lighthearted quality that was so foreign to her.
“It was exotic, actually,” she said.
Frank was constantly working in his home studio. One night, Moon Unit said, she slipped a note under the door to see if he wanted her to record “that surfer dude voice or that valley girl voice.” She advised him to reach out to her manager, Gail, if he was interested. He ended up inviting her into the studio to conduct improvisations that became the basis of the hit song in the early 1980s.
Another section of the book delves into the days when Dweezil and Moon Unit were veejays on MTV. When she sees a clip of an interview with Whitney Houston repeating with a big smile, “It’s fun being me,” she wonders, “Who says that? What the hell does that even mean?”
Houston’s words haunt her for 40 years.
“Given Whitney’s eventual fate,” Moon Unit writes,” I now have to wonder if I saw something else that day, a cautionary tale of a shining light of a girl being pushed, a girl being used, a girl wanting her words to be and stay true, a girl like me.”
Given the self-described dysfunction of growing up in the Zappa household, Moon Unit said she’s now “at peace” with herself.
“I think it’s a goal,” she said, as she combats negative thinking by addressing it head-on and trying to “turn it into something that’s useful to myself and to other people.”
Moon Unit said she’s “worked really hard” on taking the readers of her book through the journey of asking if genius is worth “the collateral damage.” Through the process, she asked friends for suggested stories to include. She narrated the audiobook version of the book, which she said fans are enjoying.
Tea is her other passion. She owns the Moon Unit Tea company.
Asked how Frank would likely view the current political landscape, Moon Unit said she wished he had been made into a hologram and given “the voice against you-know.”
“My father was such a proponent of the First Amendment and just a fighter for the civics,” she said.
Before her birth, she said, Frank gave Gail the option of naming her Motorhead or Moon Unit. Motorhead would be a nod to his childhood friend and member of his band the Mothers of Invention, Euclid James “Motorhead” Sherwood. Unit refers to the fact that Moon Unit created the family unit.