Moon Unit Zappa was only 14 years old when she helped her father, legendary art rock god Frank Zappa, accomplish something he hadn’t done before. Their 1982 collaboration, “Valley Girl,” on which Moon performed the stream-of-consciousness, quasi-rap vocals, became her dad’s first and only Top 40 hit.
Behind the scenes, though, her home life wasn’t easy. Now 56, Moon is telling all in her new memoir Earth to Moon, which details her complicated relationship with her frequently absent and emotionally distant father, who died in 1993, and her emotionally abusive mother, Gail Zappa, who died in 2015 and whom Moon calls her “first bully.” The book’s title is taken from what Gail would often say to Moon, before scolding her and dismissing her feelings.
“I didn’t really get a childhood,” Moon says of being in the public eye at a young age. “I didn’t get a chance to act out and rebel, and have tantrums, and make big mistakes.” Under the weight of external and internal pressure “to walk the straight and narrow” and feeling “marginalized and demoralized” in her own family, Moon adds, “I didn’t have the feeling of support for my f— ups.”
HarperCollins
In addition to taking us behind closed doors into the Zappa household in Earth to Moon, the author details a number of her celebrity encounters over the years. CHiPs star Erik Estrada, Emilio Estevez, Whitney Houston and Family Ties costars Michael J, Fox and Justine Bateman make appearances, and Woody Harrelson pops up in one chapter as he and Moon embark on a short-lived romance.
But she’s not just name-dropping. Each encounter reveals something about the author. “Maybe to others, it will be a story of a celebrity-dating situation,” she says of the period in the late ’80s when she dated Harrelson. “But for me, it shows how much latitude I gave people as a result of my upbringing.”
Now a mother to daughter Mathilda, 19 — whom she shares with her ex-husband, Matchbox Twenty drummer Paul Doucette — Moon feels she’s finally getting the chance to experience the childhood she missed out on while she was growing up the oldest of four kids in California’s San Fernando Valley in the strictly teetotaling Zappa household.
“In some ways, I feel like I am giving myself a second chance at a childhood,“ she says. ”I’ll go dancing more than maybe your average person might, or my inner 5 year old insisted on buying this unicorn sippy cup for my protein smoothies. So these are the kinds of things that I do with my stunted parts of myself. I make space for them, and I celebrate them, and I try to grow them up.”
Earth to Moon, A Memoir is published by HarperCollins and available wherever books are sold.
