A Girl's Life, Song by Song

The ways that people can define their childhoods and teenage years are infinite. The English author Lavinia Greenlaw, a professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, remembers her early life through record shops, vinyl, "the disco girls," and black leather pants. And her new memoir sings because of it.

Paralleling a path well trod by Nick Hornby and the herd of male music obsessives who have chronicled the importance of music to boys, Ms. Greenlaw's "The Importance of Music to Girls" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pages, $23) is instantly appealing, especially for girls with iPods and thousands of songs on their laptops, ready with a click to play the most appropriate track the instant a momentous kiss or dance occurs.

A mental and auditory roller coaster, the memoir details Ms. Greenlaw's life through age 18, beginning in the mid-1960s when she is a 4-year-old dancing with her father, moving not delicately but precipitously, digging "her nails into his shirt cuffs like someone finding a hold on a cliff." Ms. Greenlaw immediately portrays herself as fragmented and fragile, but aware of her fragility.

In North London, and later on in the northern suburb of Essex, her mother holds choir meetings at their home, where a family friend teaches singing lessons to the village ladies, their monotone screeches driving the Greenlaw children under the pillows in their bedrooms. A brush with national identity occurs as she takes, and rejects, English country dancing lessons. Finally, in 1970, at the age of 8, she discovers through her parents' record collection "West Side Story," the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," the Moody Blues, and Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay."

Like the legions of children who have misheard the hymn "Gladly the Cross I Bear" as "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear," young Lavinia makes some errors in lyric comprehension. The words to the Dylan song as she understands them? "LAY LAY DEE LAY, LAYER PONYA BIG BRA SPED."

But after that initial find, it seems, her life tumbles into music. Already, at that age, she knows genres of music carry distinct reputations: "As I came to understand music as social currency, I realized that I needed to declare an allegiance." As a tween given to panic attacks and bouts of frustrated solitude, she has difficulty fitting in at school, but she makes friends with like-minded girls, people who transform themselves based on music and trends.

At 12, Ms. Greenlaw becomes a "disco girl," drinking and dancing with a bobbed haircut and pencil skirts while listening to ABBA; Earth, Wind & Fire; Chicago, and a little Bowie thrown in for balance. Dancing happens as a rule: It was the way, the most efficient of them all, to get close to a boy, and thus for the adolescent Ms. Greenlaw, music becomes an immediate passage to romance. "The right boy with the right girl would not have to think about how to approach the dance," she writes. "It just happened, you just were, and all the thoughts you'd had about this moment ... were gone."

Also gone, instantly it seems, is her fascination with "disco": By the summer of 1976, at age 14, the author discovers punk and morphs into "a skinny girl in big boots and a torn army jacket covered in scribbled quotations. My hair was a mess, my face undefined."

It is about halfway through the memoir when punk makes its appearance, and it's at this point that Ms. Greenlaw's writing becomes the most interesting: The music she's listening to and describing — the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and eventually Ian Curtis's Joy Division — is as spontaneous and riotous as the neurons snapping in her growing brain.

When the first love of her life abandons her, she interprets her ensuing total fear of contact through the spasmodic performances of Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 after his wife left him. The teenage Lavinia romanticizes his suicide; to her, he embodies emotional overload. "Ian Curtis spoke to me of feeling beyond what a single person could bear, of something fundamental and archetypal — not a boyfriend who wouldn't pick up the phone ... but a man who mourns his wife so powerfully that he enters death in order to find her."

Such are the markers of Ms. Greenlaw's childhood and adolescence. That she could interpret her youth only through her musical fascinations and transformations is viscerally understandable: Growing up, struggling to express herself to herself, and to others, music was her common ground with the humanity that surrounded her. And despite a teenager's desire to be singular, Ms. Greenlaw found peace and definition in a universally familiar way.