The Importance of Music to Girls

(, Main)

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The Importance of Music to Girls tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into - getting drunk, falling in love, cutting our hair, wanting to change the world - as well as the darker side of the adolescent years: loneliness, bullying, getting arrested. From bubble-gum pop to classical piano to punk rock, music is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that. It is a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. Lavinia Greenlaw records the importance of music in her life, from dancing on her father's shoes as a child to discovering her parents' records, buying her own, going to concerts and singing in the streets. The personal - her school reports and diary entries, and the girl behind them - is everywhere touched by the music that compelled her generation. Fancying Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels, wanting to be Joy Division's Ian Curtis - this is a beautiful, razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the medium of music.

Author Bio

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in 1962. Night Photograph (1993) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for First Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Prize; A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997) was her award-winning second collection and most recently she published Minsk (2003) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo), was published in 2001. She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, critic and broadcaster.