Frank Zappa Once Ordered Preteen Daughter Moon Unit to 'Hide the Gun' During an Explosive Fight with Her Mom

Mar. 15, 2025

Moon Unit Zappa.Photo:Randall Slavin

Randall Slavin

Growing up is hard to do, but it can be especially challenging when you’re growing up the daughter of a rock godwho’s more connected to his music than to his own children, and his mercurial, disappointed wife.

Moon Unit Zappa, 56, survived her childhood anyway, bruised but not completely broken. The writer and actress — who scored a Top 40 hit, “Valley Girl,” with herRock and Roll Hall of FamerdadFrank Zappain 1982 at age 14 — details her journey to self-awareness in her new bookEarth to Moon, A Memoir(out now via Dey Street Books). Although she describes Frank, who died in 1993, as a guy who rarely raised his voice, his confrontationswith Moon’s mom, Gail Zappa, who died in 2015, could nonetheless get heated and scary.

“I hear Frank one room over saying, ‘Calm down,’ in a voice that isn’t loud but feels like strong arms pushing you into a chair,” Moon writes.

Moon Unit Zappa with her parents Gail Zappa and Frank Zappa in 1968.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Gun? What gun? Moon writes that she didn’t even realize they had a gun. A frantic search began. Moon never found the gun, and eventually her parents stopped fighting.

Despite the less-than-ideal experience of growing up with a distant father who was often on tour away from home or locked away in the recording studio and a motherwhom Moon calls her “first bully,“Moon tells PEOPLE that Frank and Gail Zappa taught her important lessons about parenting.

“I mean, on the most basic level, whatever they did, do the opposite,” says Moon, who has a daughter, Mathilda, 19, with her ex-husband,Matchbox Twenty drummer Paul Doucette. “I mean, I literally was like, “OK, don’t do that, and then don’t do that.”

‘Earth to Moon, A Memoir’.

“But at the same time, the magic of my mother’s… her decorating style, her sense of color, her sense of whimsy and play, the fact that she read to us growing up, there were some of those things that I did take on. I mean, I think I was pretty good at taking the best of what I experienced.”

“And then, I think, like anyone, you try to cherry-pick the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn’t, but just on the most basic level, drive them to school on time, make them a lunch, show up at the school events, ask them what they’re interested in, just on those most basic levels, take them to the doctor. These kinds of things, I definitely did differently.”

source: people.com