Coping With Frank and Gail
A Review of "Earth to Moon" by Moon Unit Zappa
Some biographies are written about a lifetime; others take a lifetime to write. And so it goes for Moon Unit Zappa, eldest daughter of Gail and Frank Zappa. In her new autobiography titled Earth to Moon (Dey St., 2024), Zappa traces her life from childhood to adulthood in a series of short chapters written as vignettes in chronological order. Tapping into her diaries, her point of view changes from a child’s voice to that of a struggling teenager and finally as a mature woman looking back on a difficult life. It’s a dark story filled with tension, anger, anxiety, and insecurity. Her principal target is Gail, because no child in the Zappa house could call their parents “mom” or “dad.” Moon is ordered, by her mother, to call them Gail and Frank revealing a kind of dysfunctional relationship from the get-go. Children aren’t allowed to be children, they have to become little people asap.
This moment from the early stories of Moon’s life comes across as contrived; a style of storytelling reserved for a creative writing class, when students are asked to “write a story about your life in the voice of a 5-year-old.” Moon Unit Zappa would get an “A” for her use of that narrative device but it begins to wear thin by the time she hits 13.
It gets better as she matures especially after the success of Frank’s big hit single “Valley Girl” in 1982. At the time, she went on a press tour to tell the story that she wrote a letter to her father and slipped it under the door of his basement studio. The letter is reproduced in her book. She writes, “Up until now I have been trying to stay out of your way while you record…I would love to sing on your album…I would love to do my ‘Encino Accent’ for you.” She adds her agent, Gail Zappa and their phone number. A sad way to communicate with your father.
While the letter and the notion of a daughter reaching out to one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century may seem quaint, the truth is she wrote it because she wanted her father’s love. But he was never around to give it. He worked all night, slept all day, and gave little time for his family. As a young teenager, Moon concluded, “My dad is shy and depressed. Shy because he is not good at talking about his feelings and he always makes jokes or cuts conversations short if anyone gets emotional. Depressed because he sleeps a lot, never smiles, never plays with us…”
While Frank works, Gail runs the house, but according to Moon, she’s a volatile, anxious, and controlling individual. As a result, Moon felt obligated to take to parenting her siblings, “Since I am two years older than (brother) Dweezil and seven years older than Ahmet, I always feel it is my duty to keep some semblance of calm and happy distraction.” The pressure was particularly high when Diva was born in 1979.
Page after page, Moon reveals her inner thoughts surrounding the domestic life of the Zappa household. It’s a mix of hippie culture, organic food, sex, and a style of parenting that would make one shiver because it was so inconsistent. She writes, “shaming and estrangement are a part of my family’s vocabulary, and anger and self-harm are becoming some of my coping skills when I feel powerless.”
Another coping skill is keeping a diary, or in the common parlance, “journaling” during those rare moments of solitude. “Frank drinks 12 cups of espresso a day; minimum…he sleeps all day until 5pm…works all night.” So Moon, and presumably her siblings, felt abandoned in their loveless house. Kids were an inconvenience not an inspiration, but for the one time Frank rustled his daughter out of bed to record her Encino-accent patter on “Valley Girl”. (At least he read her letter.)
The book continues as Moon reports on bad dates, embarrassing social situations, her strained relationship with Gail, a woman so wound up in Frank’s life that she has no life of her own. At one point, Gail tells Moon that Frank no longer loved her and she went to her bedroom and cried for hours. Moon tried to comfort her mother, but Gail wanted none of it, turning her back on the only person who could help.
Moon suffered from low self-esteem. She had a severe acne problem, and the best Gail could do was take her to a Chinese medicine man who gave her a special tea to drink. Gail was constantly on the search for alternative medical treatments. When Frank was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, Gail tried a variety of strange healing procedures from glorified quacks. In a rare moment of intimacy, Frank called Moon and told her he had stage 4 prostate cancer, saying that he had 12 months to live. This phone call changes their relationship. Moon assumes the role of caregiver to Frank, a job she did to the best of her ability, because, she suggests, Gail held Frank in contempt for his long absences on tour and his passive/aggressive attitude toward her. Moon reports that Frank had a mistress by the name of Gerda, who lived in Germany. Gail knew. Frank never denied it and she felt powerless to change his behavior. Instead, she took it out on her kids.
For Moon, who struggled to find her identity, the stress was unbearable. She writes, “I am a number to be spent, earned, lost, bargained with. We are not a family; we are a family business.” This, after Gail told Moon that she would have to sell her house to pay for Frank’s healthcare.
It got worse when Frank died in 1993, weeks shy of his 53rd birthday. In a touching passage, Moon tells the story of Frank’s last moments with his family surrounding him at his bedside at home. Gail, ever the control freak, refused to lay a gravestone even though Frank requested it, and in an act of Dickensian meanness, fails to contact Frank’s siblings, “They can hear it from the press like everyone else” Moon writes. “She [wears] her widowhood like a badge. I don’t see her cry, I only see her dressed in black, receiving visitors with a strange demurring solemnity.”
The Zappa children were in Frank’s shadow when he was alive, and it has cast a long, dark tail since he died. In a story published by The Washington Post on August 9, 2024, the kids, except for Moon, still can’t break free. As Geoff Edgers reports, “For the Zappa children, raised with one foot in the counterculture and one foot in show business, it’s an emotional calculus that became ever more complex after the 2015 death of their mother, the keeper of her late husband’s challenging legacy.” Dweezil, the band leader who continues to play his father’s great music, around the world, is currently not speaking to his siblings. Perhaps he finds consolation in playing his father’s music?
For Moon, this book will act as the crux of the biscuit to a life in recovery. It reveals a lot of things I would rather not know about the subject of my 2016 release, Frank Zappa FAQ (Backbeat), a book that seeks to bring people into his music, but not into his life. Sadly, Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva were in his life, barely, under the tough-minded Gail, a brilliant businesswoman, who was impossible to live with.
Nevertheless, Moon’s book is an honest, insightful, and occasionally funny record of the Zappa household with all the pitfalls of having a famous last name. As Frank once retorted, “it’s their last name that will probably get them in trouble.”
In my book, I wrote that Frank was “a dedicated parent who cared about his kids.” I was wrong to reach that conclusion, but at the time, since the family kept to themselves, that’s the conclusion I drew. I took his word for it. Having read Moon Unit’s deeply personal autobiography, which literally strips away the mystique surrounding the great composer, I feel better for having read it. In fact all of his fans around the world should read it.
Frank’s art came at a huge cost to his family when he was alive. After he died it created the kind of legal interactions between the siblings, that make the popular TV series Succession look like a Disney movie.
Nevertheless, my relationship with Frank’s music has not changed. His recordings are funny, clever, and dynamic. At times his melodies are strikingly beautiful and other times he’s just messing with my head. Frank was complex. A brilliant composer who fundamentally believed in the First Amendment above all else. Unfortunately, he was a shitty parent.