MemoirLavinia Greenlaw plunges straight into the intoxications of gyration: here she is as an infant, dancing on her father's shoes, getting a sense of the world as a whirligig, and torn between wanting to let go and holding on.
This is a book about keeping or losing one's balance, about revelling in dizziness or preferring sobriety. Its style veers between elegance and eccentricity, poise and pretentiousness. The author is capable of overdoing her feelings and her refusal of prudence - and what eight-year-old, you may ask, is going to launch herself through a window, as Greenlaw does at one point, and step unscathed out of the wreckage around her, conscious of nothing but being at peace?
But perhaps we shouldn't take such incidents too literally: Greenlaw is a poet, skilled in the uses of metaphor and obliquity. Her inner life is the thing: her imagined world, she says, was always "more vivid and more felt" than everyday reality with its puzzles and discords. And music, the music connected to her generation in particular, provides a way of externalising those big inner feelings, of imposing an outline on certain unwieldy experiences and states of mind, while preserving a fastidious distance from them.
The author was "bad at being a child", she tells us; and certainly the flow of events begins to crystallise somewhat once adolescence kicks in and normal teenage activities come to the fore: boys; friendships; bondage trousers; music pounding behind closed doors at home; bands with names such as Anorexia, The Urge, Prag Vec, Deep Throats; hair gel; having fun. But The Importance of Music. . . is not a book to read for its narrative impetus. It comes in intense segments of pop-musical comment, anchored in autobiography, with the facts disclosed sparingly, bit by bit. The aesthetic overlay is important, not the background. But aspects of the background emerge nevertheless. Dates and locations are given. Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London in 1962 and lived there for a time before her family moved to Essex.
SHE IS A doctor's daughter. She goes to secondary school and buys her first single. A crush on Donny Osmond is put behind her. She is serious about music, about Chopin's Preludes and contemporary punk. She experiences some difficulty in being a girl, having headstrong tendencies - but forming a gang of three with a couple of female friends enables her, at least, "to go forth into the world arms linked, making noise". They are disco girls, the three of them, who smoke and drink and aspire to bin-liners as a fashion statement. They shriek and giggle and dance and sing. They play truant from school and exhibit a scornful attitude to study. Disturbance is their element.
Time passes. The Queen's Jubilee duly takes place, along with topical events such as the Rock Against Racism carnival in London and anti-National Front rallies. Different musical scenes are evoked, all now enveloped in a passé luminosity. Lavinia Greenlaw enjoys trips abroad and - back home - gets herself arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs. She sits some exams - not doing too well - and moves on to a sixth form college. Her hair is spiked and dyed blue, and her clothes sport rips and pins. A band called Joy Division gains her allegiance. She is flaunting the distinguishing marks of alienated adolescence - alienated, that is, from Essex decorum, from pragmatism, from steady school work and parental expectations. By the time she decides she wants "a real education" after all, it is nearly too late.
NEARLY, BUT NOT quite. Poor grades have brought her to her senses - or to a sense of different possibilities, new objectives and forms of social dissent - and we know about her eventual further education, her Gregory award, her importance as one of the "New Generation" poets (none of which comes into this book). As far as her early life is concerned, it is irony as a mode of perception that sees her through, an irony extending to the title of her memoir, and to the way she presents herself - though at times this quality loses out to an overdose of introspection. The Importance of Music to Girlsis, on the whole, a pungent and compelling work, with an original slant. But the teacher who wrote in an end-of-term report, "Lavinia tends to be very extreme emotionally" has a point, you feel.
The Importance of Music to Girls: A Memoir By Lavinia Greenlaw Faber & Faber, 197pp. £15.99
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Asking for Trouble, her memoir of Belfast and Donegal, will be published by Blackstaff in the autumn