Recently, while strolling in the depths of the San Fernando Valley, I saw a sidewalk stencil that said, "Not all cults are bad." I had to laugh. In my memoir, I revisited the old territory of growing up the daughter of a rock icon who I always saw as one part Spock and one part Jesus. I didn't just compete for his affection in my childhood home, I battled the fervent flock he ministered to, his fans, proselytizing to the feverish believers with his acerbic, satiric siren songs.

My family dynamic was not dissimilar to a cult. I willingly ate, slept, drank, and lived for our larger-than-life leader. Only ours was the good kind because I couldn't get enough of my father's gallows humor and unending output of creativity. Sign me up for that kind of isolation.

Each album in my father's vast catalog is a time capsule, each tune a memory generator transporting me to a fixed location in space and time. Sometimes I'm as tall as his tibia listening to playback in his makeshift studio in our basement in what would become our Laurel Canyon compound. Or I'm tucked in tight in my top bunk in the bedroom I shared with Dweezil, hugging my raggedy Ann and hearing his latest composition warbling through our intercom system. Or I'm suddenly nine and sitting atop a big metal case on casters on the side of the stage at one of Frank's shows watching my God-like father I idolized smoke and sermonize on his guitar, in a halo of magenta and chartreuse light.

I received my first journal when I was 5, with an inscription from my blood hero in Frank's beautiful block script in black ink. When I wasn't writing short stories about my imaginary camels T'Mershi Duween and Sinini, or drawing myself dressed as a nun, I was crudely sketching Gail and Frank sideways and naked, stacked on a mattress like pancakes from DuPar's. I reported what I saw or hoped to see instead. Or what I feared about UFOs and aliens since Gail told me her Naval officer father was murdered for what he knew about Area 51.

Later, in my teens, my journals became a record of my father's whereabouts and my subsequent complaints about his absence. Frank traveled all the time. In a touring cycle, he might stay gone for the better part of a year, with only the briefest returns, a bird alighting on a branch. Gail often took her loneliness out on me. This only doubled my deep longing for his time, attention, and affection. More accurately, I ached.

Who wouldn't? Frank was tall, charismatic, smart, funny, and wild-looking. Skinny as an eel and effeminate with long black hair, a beak of a nose, and platform shoes, but also masculine with his signature mustache, chest hair, smoking, cursing, and wearing ball-crushing sailor's pants. His presence, prolificity, and perfectionism demanded your full attention.

So yeah, early on I knew my family was different. Not just because our house was festooned with overflowing ashtrays, empty coffee cups, an Ouija board, raunchy comics and magazines covering everything from scientific discoveries to smut. No. other kids I knew could drop f-bombs, stay up late, watch as much TV as they wanted, and help themselves to a drawer full of Mint Milanos and Nutter Butters.

Moon Unit Zappa, Frank Zappa
Moon Unit Zappa (L). Frank Zappa performs on stage at Ahoy on 15th May 1982 in Rotterdam, Netherlands (R). Harper Collins Publishers/Getty Images/Rob Verhorst/Redferns

No one else I knew had a purple living room or a blow-up sex doll in their father's workspace. No one else had an adopted echidna that lived at the zoo. No one else's father brought a pancake home in his jacket pocket all the way from Europe for Gail to taste, reverse engineer, and recreate. And not a single adult I knew had a birthday party with their ice-cold pool decorated with more bobbing watermelons than I could count. We didn't celebrate Gail on Mother's Day, we celebrated the Mother of Invention. And not just one day a year, all of them.

My fatherly worship was baked into bones thanks to my namesake. Plain old Frank and Gail decided on Moon Unit for their firstborn, a daring act of nonconformity in a 1967 sea of sameness. "Unit" because my birth solidified us as a family unit, and "Moon" because Gail didn't like Frank's other suggestion—Motorhead.

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It made international news. Just like that, family became the most important thing to me, and my father became the fiery star I'd revolve around, always reflecting his light, never seeing shadow—his or my own. Undoing that conditioning and placing myself at the center of my life would take some time—about five decades.

As a kid, I was mesmerized. I loved how he could seemingly play any instrument or know how to compose for them. I loved how every sound was a color in my father's palette, a tool for his experimentations and "air sculpting." I loved Frank's inside jokes and his made-up words like "Gream", the day between Thursday and Friday. I loved hearing about how far he had come from his catholic upbringing, eating "boiled hot dog water," playing with the mercury from a broken thermometer, getting in trouble for blowing up his high school's science lab with a homemade concoction, or how he once had a job drawing rude greeting cards.

Sometimes I would get lucky and I'd get to help Gail choose clothes for Frank in the women's section at IMagnin's at the open-air mall in the tree-lined flats. My father was like a tall, weird doll to me then. Gail said he preferred women's clothing, especially for stage wear, with its softer, drapey fabrics in better colors. I loved learning about a-lines and V-necks and how to tell the difference between polyester and cotton, wool and silk, expensive and cheap.

Frank and Gail liked expensive things. A nubby lavender-colored jacket with pockets got my vote, as did a long camel coat for his upcoming SNL appearance that I particularly coveted. After Frank had worn these items for a while, I loved breathing in his comforting smells of tobacco, sweat, and dandruff shampoo. I was proud I looked like him, inherited his long torso, and his passion for stripes.

Then he'd be gone again, just when I was getting used to having him around, and my heart would close up, and all the color left the world.

A technicolor remembrance is a time Frank took Gail and me to attend a live performance of Lily Tomlin. Well, Gail took us because she's the only one who drove. My father notoriously refused to renew his license as a protest against his requirement to stand in line at the DMV, so Gail was the only affordable and obliging solution.

On stage all by herself, Lily seemed like a giant—as big as the Statue of Liberty. To me, she looked a little like my dad, tall and skinny with a long face and wavy black hair. I was therefore doubly captivated. I liked how she moved her body and voice changed each time she became a new character. I especially loved it when she was a baby in a giant highchair and a snorting telephone lady from the 1940s.

Like Frank, she made fun of common things in an uncommon way. Unlike Frank, Lily had no need for an instrument or a backing band. The whole show was just her just talking! When I heard Frank laugh, really laugh, a rarity, a seed was planted. I wished I could make him laugh like that, too.

Eventually, I did. Entering middle school, I noticed and mimicked the voices of the popular girls I heard at my school or at a mall where we all socialized in the heart of the San Fernando Valley called The Galleria. I got some genuine and hearty laughs out of the man I worshipped. Between missing my father so terribly and this small encouragement, at 13, though shy and covered in acne, I felt brave enough to write a note and slip it under his studio door insisting we work together since I rightly deduced that is what he clearly liked doing most.

It worked.

Then fate intervened. A private father-daughter moment became a hit song with worldwide recognition and a press avalanche I neither sought nor wanted. I was suddenly eternally publicly linked with my father a second time and held on a fame and admiration pedestal alongside him. I got fan mail from girls as far away as Russia and Australia, Tokyo, and Nova Scotia. I was suddenly so known, I was paired with Frank in Sun Signs, Linda Goodman's book of astrology as a perfect example of compatibility between a Sagittarius and a Libra.

Though Frank and I were relentlessly heard on the radio and seen in magazines and on TV together for a solid stretch of time, a time when I had a lot of geometry homework I wasn't good at, my father and I got only a little bit closer.

In 1989 my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given a year to live he was 48 and I was 22. If I am honest, I found my reaction to his diagnosis confusing. Of course, I didn't want my father to suffer or leave this world with unfinished work or dashed political dreams when he had so much more to say. But, oddly, secretly, I also felt gratitude. I still lived for the possibility of uninterrupted proximity to my father and a chance to finally have my turn at an extended time with him. But to my extreme disappointment, he only became more obsessed with his work given how little remaining time he had.

As far as his prognosis went, Gail was the mouthpiece, often sharing information with me that she didn't share with him. Gail's reasoning was Frank was incapable of dealing with disappointment. Dutiful to a fault, I did not discuss my father's health or his feelings with him. Not my siblings, not Gail's, not my own. Besides, Frank had raised me to believe "Feelings are irrelevant," and "Happiness is not a goal." But also, "Anger is fuel."

Instead, we spent a lot of energy as a family trying to take his mind off of his situation through various attempts at amusing distractions, or by giving what comfort we could.

On one occasion, we somehow managed to convince him to see a movie in a movie theatre. But I was extra careful not to waste any of the time he could have spent in his studio so, to stave off any potential disappointment, I pre-emptively prescreened the film it to make sure it was suitable. Sure it meant I'd have to watch a sci-fi movie twice that I didn't even want to see once, but it was simply too risky to blow the outing on something sub-par. The film my family took him to was Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. He loved it. Especially Kuato. Especially when the mutant baby bursts from the actor Marshall Bell's stomach. I was so relieved. And happy. Ish.

To alleviate the pain I was in, I had turned to spirituality as my best defense against the anguish and preemptive grief about losing my favorite person. When my self-identified atheist father found out he said, "If you're going to be a cabinet, be the best cabinet you can be."

I was awash with shame, but it sparked a conversation about beliefs—he had none—about any fear about dying—none, he just didn't think about it—and about what happens after. He said, "Nothing happens. It probably all goes off. Like a light switch."

A totally Spock response. I was shaken. Maybe he saw that. Maybe he was, too, because the next time I saw him, he surprised me with a picture he had drawn for me on the back of a large sheet of his butter-colored music paper.

It was a cross with two lines emphasizing energy emanating from the shining top and an arrow coming out of the center of the cross to the left. At the top of the page, in his beautiful block print, it said: "A picture of God for Moon." My eyes flooded with tears. This was such a loving gesture, but kind of a weird drawing. I asked him what it all meant. He pointed to the arrow and said, "That's the Kuato extension." Oh. It was visual satire and a loving gesture. That unstoppable humor and intelligence again. I laughed. He looked so pleased.

I left with that drawing and immediately had it framed like gilded religious art with royal blue velvet and an over-the-top gold frame. I brought it back to give it to him. When I showed it to him, it was his turn to laugh and my turn to be pleased. That art piece now hangs on my wall and remains one of my most prized possessions. Seeing his handwriting makes Frank materialize and strangely brings automatic comfort.

Recently I shared this story with my sister-in-law and texted her a photo of the art piece. She had never seen Total Recall, so the Kuato reference was lost on her. I looked the film up on the internet to and texted her the description I found: "Kuato is a minor character from the 1990's sci-fi movie, who resembles a deformed infant, fused to the stomach of his conjoined twin."

I read further. Dialog I had forgotten: "You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory."

Mic drop. Another time capsule from Frank. This time a hidden message in a drawing he made, not a song, but the ink from the maestro's pen. A holy magic trick. No need to look back, it says, I live inside you, like a mutant conjoined twin. Now let's go make some art.

The very thing I needed to hear.

Moon Unit Zappa is an actress, singer and author. She is the daughter of Frank Zappa. Her book EARTH TO MOON: A Memoir, is on sale August 20, 2024.

All views expressed are the author's own.

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