Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and ‘rock’s most committed iconoclast’, as his New York Times obituary described him, for 27 years, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, aged 52.

A year after that first, snot-filled seduction, the Zappas were married, a week before Gail gave birth to Moon Unit, the first of four children. Moon’s name is not a compound noun: Unit is her middle name, given to reflect how her arrival turned two people into a single family – Frank’s idea.

Moon’s memoir is partly a meditation on a lost milieu, a portrait of the Laurel Canyon countercultural landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, made lucid through a child’s eyes. But the Los Angeles setting is less important than the grimness of the family’s home life. This is mostly the story of a disastrous marriage, endless battles, a dysfunctional upbringing and children trapped by their parents’ unhappiness – even as adults.

Moon is now 56, and still famous by association, but she can certainly write. Her strengths are her sense of the absurd, and an ability to conjure a scene from decades’ old memory in a way that feels lucid and real. It would be tempting to attribute the former to Frank’s legacy, but it was Gail who read to Moon and encouraged her to read, notably Dr Seuss.

Like many abusive parents, how-ever, Gail is never one thing. She oscillates between affection and fury. She threatens and manipulates.