[ book tip by Katy Barrett ] Until last week, I was embarrassed to remember that the first single that I bought was by the Spice Girls. I have always thought that my inability to connect to music which is in any way 'cool' was best not advertised. That is, until I read Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls. 

This engaging, evocative memoir of Greenlaw’s teenage years, recalls the music which she encountered to create a vivid picture of growing up in the 1970s. From the early physicality of music, being 'danced' on her father's shoes, to intellectual concerns with war and capitalism expressed through music criticism, Greenlaw explores music as a medium for growing up. In my favourite chapter, she constructs wonderful 'kitchen arias' around chaotic family life. Music becomes a vehicle not just for learning about life, but for learning how to be alive. 

Yet, Greenlaw’s narrative is not just evocative of an era, but of the eternal experience of teenage girlhood. As she moves through English country-dance, blues, opera, punk, rock, jazz… music is a means of finding her identity, of expressing her youth, maturity, femininity, 'afeminity', normality, and rebellion. Music is not only the soundtrack to, but the substance of, her life, 'I couldn’t understand anything without music.' 

This memoir reminded me strongly of the musical, Spring Awakening, now playing in London, in which rock music is used to express the rages and ecstasies of German teenagers repressed within a rigid school regime. Greenlaw’s lyrical, 'mix-tape' of a memoir expresses equally powerfully the way in which music is feeling in our teenage years. 

How does all this relate to me and the Spice Girls? Even the Katy who bought the Spice Girls is part of who I was and what I will become. Greenlaw shows that she is someone to be celebrated, not regretted.

[ Favourite quote ] "In the musical world everything was elastic."
"If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway."
"We could see how it worked, and so it stopped working."

[ book info ] Greenlaw, Lavinia: The Importance of Music to Girls. (original language: English) Faber and Faber, London, 2008 (2007). ISBN: 978-0-571-23029-7.