A former Reading College lecturer is bowled over with the response to her first book, Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa.

Admittedly, not everyone’s letters home from abroad 40 years ago would tell a tale of crazy years in a log cabin above the Hollywood sign with a rock ‘n’ roll legend and his entourage. Author Pauline Butcher – now Bird – was a rather buttoned-up, prim and proper Twickenham girl in her early 20s when she met Zappa in 1967.

She was so far removed from the swinging 60s, she had no idea who he was (she then blundered on to ask Eric Clapton which instrument he played).

Despite the contrast, Pauline went to America and spent three years as part of the eclectic household, mixing with the likes of Mama Cass, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. It was an era many will look back on through rose-coloured glasses – but today’s Pauline is still amazed at the media attention given to her autobiography when it was launched earlier this month.

She told getreading: “Nobody was expecting anything to happen with this, including me. I am an unknown author, Frank Zappa’s definitely not equal to The Beatles or Rolling Stones. The book is a 4,000 run, a modest publication, but I am taken aback by the amazing response. There is interest from all the main newspapers, from Radio 4... my story has captured imaginations.

“I went out there totally besotted with this man, I was thrilled to bits when he asked me to go and live with him with this huge entourage – I ended up in this madness and I was a very prim and proper young lady.” Pauline’s meeting with Zappa, who died in 1993, was purely by chance and nothing to do with hanging around a stage door with groupies. In those pre-laptop days, travelling businessmen needed secretaries to type up notes for them on portable typewriters.

Pauline was working for a London secretarial agency when a Mr Zappa needed someone to go to his hotel room and write up song lyrics. The rest of her story until she returned home in 1971 is, as they say, history – but it is a slice of history oozing names like John Lennon and Captain Beefheart and a snapsnot of those long-haired, Indian print LA days. For Zappa fans, it is also an intimate picture of the iconic frontman of The Mothers of Invention.

Pauline went to America to help Zappa with a book he had been commissioned to write (but never did). Instead, she acted as his secretary, ran his United Mutations fan club and helped with Girls Together Outrageously, a girl band produced by Zappa.

But all dreams, even crazy ones, come to an end. Pauline said: “I gradually came to see I needed more, this was no longer the be all and end all. I had always wanted to go to uni and in the first chapter I told him [Zappa] that, but he said education can f*** you up. For the next three or four years, my education was this extraordinary experience.

“I got ill. I had applied to do a journalism course but I got very ill and I wanted my mother. While I was here [in England] recovering, I was still working for Frank, then I found I could apply to Cambridge Uni and they offered me a place – there was no contest. I met my husband there, had my son very soon and from there on, for 25 years, I never mentioned it again.”

During that time, Pauline taught A-level psychology at Reading College for around 12 years, but she resurrected her dream of becoming a writer when her son Damien went to university.

She said her Zappa opus started as the germ of a Radio 4 play, but Germaine Greer got in first. The novel finally took shape, prompted by the letters her mother had kept, when Pauline moved to Singapore with her husband, Peter – they will be moving back into their home in Devonshire Park, in the university area, in the spring.

She said: “When I tried to write a play, a Radio 4 producer told me you have to write something no-one else can write. I thought the only story is my story.”

The author said when she looks back, she sees basically the same person she is four decades on.

“I am essentially straight-laced, I was never into drugs, didn’t sleep around and had a boyfriend. I can see myself in some of the things – some I cringe over, but I am the same person.”

The book is available now priced £14.99.

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