Moon Unit Zappa recently told Mojo magazine that writing this eye-popping memoir was like “spelunking in hell”. As her tale of growing up in a rock’n’roll family wends on, you wonder how the eldest child of LA musician Frank Zappa and his manager Gail survived decades of deeply iffy parental behaviour and the complex dynamic it seeded between her and her creatively named siblings.
There’s some context to be aware of: Zappa’s warring offspring only settled a long-running feud about their father’s estate in 2019 (Frank died of cancer in 1993 and Gail passed away in 2015). This acrimonious legal saga was all the more remarkable for being engineered by Gail, when, according to Moon, she ignored Zappa’s will and gave her younger children, Ahmet and Diva, greater control over the Zappa family trust than Moon and her brother Dweezil.
