“All autobiography is self-indulgent,” said Daphne du Maurier — and the same is often true of memoirs. Some have a tale of blood-curdling childhood misery to tell, which gives them a raison d’être. But my favourite kind (and one at which the British excel) is that in which very little happens to someone resolutely ordinary.

The Importance of Music to Girls belongs, ostensibly, to that tradition. Although a respected poet, Lavinia Greenlaw is by no means a household name. Her unexceptional subject matter — a middle-class childhood in 1970s Britain — comes wrapped in a literary conceit. It is, the blurb promises, a story of girlhood “filtered through the medium of music”, from playground chants to punk rebellion.

In fact, the music often seems like less of a filter than a footnote: a marketing gimmick to make the book easier to sell. Music is fiendishly hard to describe and Greenlaw seldom tries, instead dishing up the soundtrack to her youth in long, indigestible lists. “The 1977 charts were moody and indecisive,” she declares, “full of songs about not wanting to talk by bands who couldn’t be bothered: They Shoot Horses Don’t They? — Racing Cars; Torn Between Two Lovers — Mary MacGregor; Another Suitcase in Another Hall — Barbara Dickson.” It’s about as evocative as reading the cover of Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume 1.

Greenlaw’s real concern is her inner life, and the growing pains of childhood and adolescence. The daughter of two Hampstead doctors, who later transplanted the family to rural Essex, she seems to have been an ill-fitting, melancholic creature from the start. Graduating from hyperactive tomboy to wannabe “disco girl” — striving after a frosted, tonged vision of feminity always just beyond her grasp — to black-clad indie ironist, she treads the pilgrim trail towards some kind of self-acceptance.

Along the way there are moments of sudden, colourful drama. At four, she accidentally impales herself on a bamboo cane, narrowly missing her brain. At 14, she cuts her friend Cara’s hair into a ragged mess; Cara, faced with her father’s wrath, quietly slips upstairs and takes an overdose.

The best memoirs are funny and acutely observant, throwing open the curtains onto a lost place and time. Greenlaw doesn’t make jokes, but her gaze, when she turns it onto the wider world, can be sharp. Her descriptions of 1970s Britain (a country caught between two eras, where teenage punks skulked self-consciously on the fringes of silver-jubilee street parties) make fascinating reading.

Alas, though, these moments are much too rare. For most of the time, Greenlaw’s talents are lost in a solipsistic fug. Worse, having invited the reader to examine her navel, she veils it in language that is lyrical but wilfully abstruse: “Just as I had rushed through childhood, the world seemed now to rush through me and kept me in a flutter. I felt too insubstantial to hold my place. The bright room had opened its door, but to make my way through that loaded air felt like pushing through waves.” It’s the self-indulgence of the poet — deeper and more enervating by far than that of the memoirist.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC TO GIRLS by Lavinia Greenlaw
Faber £15.99 pp224
Buy the book here at the offer price of £14.39 (inc p&p)

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