I-95 Exclusive: Exploring the Complex Life of Moon Unit Zappa, Insights from Her Memoir

Moon Unit Zappa is the daughter of one of Rock & Roll's oddest and most revered geniuses. The label of Frank Zappa's daughter cannot be easy for a variety of reasons but it's not Moon's only title. She's an actress and author who has done an amazing amount of work to understand herself and the world around her.

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Zappa just released her memoir titled "From Earth to Moon" and the reviews are very good. We got the opportunity to chat with Moon on the Thursday (10/10/24) edition of the I-95 Morning Show and these are some of our favorite moments.

Dave: You really do not pull any punches throughout the entire book.

Moon: "Yeah I think it's jarringly honest and I expose a lot. Books, and music, and bands, these things saved my life when I needed help. So I know if I can help someone stop looping and have the 3 am sooner than that is my civic duty."

Ethan: I can't even begin to imagine the complexity of your life growing up, can you tell us some of your coping mechanisms? 

Moon: "Early on I kept a journal and my Frank and Gail, I called them Frank and Gail growing up. Already that's tricky because usually you have a whole lifetime of being a kid and then you graduate to calling your parents by their first names. That peer-to-peer premise when you're very small is already, it's difficult to navigate but they did give me journals every year for my birthday and I made use of them. I felt like I was just basically writing a police report just calling things like I saw it. In the book I really ask, is genius worth the collateral damage? One of my coping skills besides writing in my journal was dissociating."  

Lou: You grew up in a famous family, in Los Angeles, in the 1970s, and we are, all of us seeing the dismantling of the Hollywood casting couch and some of these underground sex crimes. It's all coming crumbling down before our eyes thankfully but I have to imagine just based on the time period and some of your circumstances that you had to have seen and heard things that would make a hooker blush?

Moon: "Yeah you know when your father moves a groupie into the basement and has the whole sexual revolution in your living room, it takes up a lot of the oxygen in the environment. You know the thing that's tricky was I got the message that, and I don't think it was intentional but if my father was spending time with people he didn't care about because it was just recreation, then of course I became jealous of anything that got his attention and if the thing meant nothing to him, and he didn't spend time with me, then I meant less than nothing. That is how, I did kid math in my head so to walk myself through those memories and reclaim myself and say oh this is not intended or they weren't even paying attention, or this is just a biproduct of the times. I've had therapists come up to me and say thank you so much, I'm recommending this to all of my clients because again, we can loop on stuff and these are invisible injuries, emotional, psychological, psychic and it's more difficult to navigate that terrain."

We covered some really heavy things but managed to find time to have some fun along the way and Moon is so fun to talk to that, having fun was easy.

Moon's Words

The Healing Power of Books 

A Crush Revealed 

Thank you Moon! You were an absolute delight to speak with.

Call me Justine.

Listen to our complete, two-part interview with Moon Unit Zappa below. 

Part 1 - Moon chatted about the deep personal issues she addresses in the book. 

Part 2 - We chatted about the many temptations that lurk in Hollywood, Scientology and James Patterson novels. 

Check out the Ethan, Lou & Large Dave Podcast on Apple and Spotify

Amazon says:

"From Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, comes a memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age in the Hollywood Hills in the 1980s as the “Valley Girl,” gaining momentum as an accidental VJ on a new network called MTV, and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the testing of her most important relationships.

How can you navigate life as the “normal” child of an extraordinary creative? What is it like to live in a hothouse of individuality that on one hand fosters freedom of expression, and on the other tamps down the basic desires of a child for boundaries and affection? Should you call your parents Frank and Gail from birth?

For Moon Unit Zappa, processing a life so punctuated by the whims of genius, the tastes of popular culture, the calculus of celebrity, and the nature of love, was at times eviscerating, at times illuminating—but mostly deeply confusing. Yes, this is a book about growing up in the shadow of Frank Zappa. Moon and her family were a source of constant curiosity, for their unique names and for their father’s reputation as a musical savant and fierce protector of the First Amendment, even though he was never a commercial success.

Searching for her own path, first as her father’s inadvertent musical collaborator and public sidekick with their surprise mega radio hit, then as an actress, an artist, a spiritual person, a wife and mother, Moon Unit calculates ever-changing equations of fame, family, death and ultimately legacy when dealt the shocking news that Gail’s will established an unequal distribution among the remaining, tight-knit Zappas, catalyzing a quest for meaning and redemption.

With love, humor, and humility, Earth to Moon reminds us that every family is faced with problems that are unique to their particular makeup, but the journey to growing into yourself with grace is as universal as it gets."