On Writing my Memoir Freak Out, My Life with Frank Zappa

A first-time writer over fifty; On Writing my Memoir Freak Out, My Life with Frank Zappa

Like thousands of others, I always wanted to be a writer. I achieved it in the end with my memoir, Freak Out, My Life with Frank Zappa, published in 2011 by Plexus and translated into Spanish, Italian and Czech. BBC Radio 4 adapted it into an afternoon play in 2014. A revised edition was published in 2022. But the road to get here was long and rocky.  

I read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours to learn a skill, be it a lawyer, architect, doctor, pianist or writer, and so it was – nine years after I began in 2002, the book was published. 

I started late because I’d concentrated on our son’s upbringing and it was not until I returned from taking him to Oxford University to study history that I realized it was ‘now or never’. 

At first, I tried to write an afternoon play for the BBC. I’d listened all my life to their afternoon dramas and reckoned I’d worked out the formulae – an old person’s day is interrupted by a real or imagined other person, be it a child, relative, friend or stranger. This other person disturbs memories from the protagonist’s early life, some secret guilt. Through the dialogue between these two people, the protagonist comes to the realization that the pain and repression from this earlier tragedy, no longer holds. Simple.

I received letters from the BBC when I sent in my attempts saying I was nearly there and even a phone call that I was on the right track. Then a producer wrote, ‘Your best bet is to write something that no one else can write,’ and I thought, the only thing that no one else could write was my experience working and living in Frank Zappa’s house in Hollywood in 1968. 

So, the story began as a play, but then Germaine Greer got a similar idea and was commissioned to make a documentary about Frank Zappa for Radio 4. They would not counsel two programs about one man in the same year. Devastated to get so close yet so far, I wrote to every publisher I could find and asked if they would be interested in my memoir. Twelve of them wrote back and said yes, so I knew I had a marketable product.

Fortunately for me, my mother had kept my countless letters, some twenty pages long, in a shoe-box for forty years: it took nine months to type and intersperse them with my diaries. They describe, with a skeptical eye, life at the log cabin.

It took another six years while I bashed the early drafts into shape. During that time, I’d moved with my husband to Singapore and I have to admit that our live-in maid, Rini, did make a difference. While I sat beneath a thatched awning in the jungle-space by the pool, pounding at the keyboard for ten hours at a stretch, Rini served my breakfast, coffee, lunch, tea and dinner; she washed, ironed, folded bedding and clothes. Even our groceries were brought in a van when Rini ordered them by phone. The only downside was an increasing measurement round my waist. 

Getting it right was a struggle. For example, how to make dialogue of living people sound authentic, like for example, Mick Jagger who, with Marianne Faithful made up one whole chapter. Sometimes, it took more than a day to complete a paragraph.

I had learned from Stephen King’s book on writing, that one should place the finished manuscript in a drawer for three months, and then read it again with a fresh eye. I did not do this but sent it off immediately: it was published within a few months and sold well. But I was not completely satisfied and thankfully, my publisher agreed to a new edition published in 2022 which focuses more closely on my tangled relationship with Frank Zappa and his wife, Gail. 

The story begins on the day I met Frank Zappa in London when he was on a trip to promote his forthcoming tour with his group, The Mothers of Invention. I was a young, somewhat prim girl but had the courage to tell him that one of his songs, Brown Shoes Don’t Make It, was immoral, and this seemed to connect.

He told me he’d been commissioned to write a book about the politics of young people in America and invited me to work on it at his house in the Hollywood hills. What he didn’t tell me was that nine other people lived there, including his wife, Gail, and baby, Moon Unit. The political book was forgotten. Instead, Frank composed every day at the piano and rehearsed with the Mothers, while rock stars wandered in, freaks abounded and family squabbles erupted each week. I was left to manage a girl-group that Frank had cobbled together. This is the story of the book. 

I hope that others who may also harbor a secret desire to publish their novel or memoir will heed the advice I was given – write something that no one else can write.

Cc pauline butcher bird August 2023.

My agent is Laura Susijn of The Susijn Agency Ltd

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Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa: Laurel Canyon 1968 – 1971

This new, revised and updated edition of Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa by Pauline Butcher will be released in a slightly smaller paperback “B” format.

Pauline Butcher realised after she had written the first edition of Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa that she no longer needed to live in his shadow. This realisation, along with the success of the book, gave her new confidence. In the first edition, she upgraded all of the women in Frank Zappa’s life and downgraded herself. With this new confidence, she has revised her book so that the relationship between Frank and her is the central thread.

Living and working at Zappa’s log cabin for four years, Pauline spent her days and nights in the company of Hollywood royalty. From drinking sessions with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull to visits from Eric Clapton and Captain Beefheart, Pauline brings to life the realities behind the perceived glamour of Hollywood, and paints a perceptive picture of the creative process of Frank Zappa’s writing and the backdrop that inspired it.

In a new chapter about the Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and her guests, which happened just a few miles away from the log cabin, her musings on how quickly ‘life could change from major to minor’ provide a fascinating insight into the experience of living in Hollywood with a musical legend at a time when it felt like no one could be trusted. With this background of chaos that brought an end to the optimism of the sixties, this book captures the intense experience of a young woman thrust into the madness, both within the log cabin and beyond.

Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa is a coming of age story in the 1960s with Women’s Liberation being the driving force to change. This new revised edition will contain a wealth of new material, including a dossier of what happened to the cast of characters who hung out at the log cabin and who drift through Pauline’s story, excerpts from the author’s private letters home about life in Hollywood, and five interviews which Pauline conducted with Frank Zappa, published here for the first time, on subjects as diverse as parenting, children, AIDS, composing and evangelism. All these come together to create a revelatory portrait of Frank Zappa and the strange and unique friendship that the author had with him.

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Category: On Writing