The Importance of Music to Girls

By Lavinia Greenlaw
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Importance of Music to Girls is a memoir of Lavinia Greenlaw’s childhood and adolescence. The book aims to describe Greenlaw’s transformation from child to young adult through the lens of the music that influenced her. She provides scenes from her childhood, demonstrating as she ages her angst, her desire to fit in or to rebel, her inability to concentrate on schoolwork, her embrasure of punk culture, and the music that influenced her.

Greenlaw writes the book in a series of short scenes that illuminate moments and periods of her life. Some, especially as she approaches and enters adolescence, are marked by moving honesty about the pain of transformation and the volatile emotions of youth. Some of the earlier scenes lack this raw appeal. Greenlaw provides sparse background information and little setting of the scenes. One finishes the book without really knowing her parents, siblings, friends, or her neighborhood. Perhaps the music is intended to be enough of an environment, but this reader wanted more.

Readers would be more likely to empathize and to care about Greenlaw’s development if they were allowed a better glimpse into her surroundings, her influences, and her own analysis, years later, of how these experiences affected her personal development. As it is, the book lacks a hook to engage readers and keep them turning the pages.

Review by Jessica Jacobson

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The Importance of Music to Girls