Poppy Z. Brite, better known for her punk-gothic horror and dreadful taste in clothing (the jacket photo shows her looking like a reject from a 1985 audition for a Cure video) here gets her hands on something much scarier than club-hopping vampires: the life of Courtney Love. Born Love Michelle Harrison, Courtney's childhood combines the worst of doped-up hippie parenting with her innate autism to produce a life that could only lead to rock-and-roll stardom. Starting with her first acid trip at age 4, administered by her father, a paragon of parental responsibility, Courtney went on to four name changes, two years in juvenile detention, a trip to Japan courtesy of a white slave ring, living with gloom rockers in Liverpool, and a melange of drugs and sexual experiments all prior to leaving her teens. This makes for quite the page-turner--in a guilty sort of way and in spite of Poppy Z.'s occasionally cutesy-teen prose: "Courtney Love has always been surrounded by chaos, triumph, pain, and glamour." Still, in spite of the taboo of reading celebrity bios, this one stands out because of the truly odd and, perhaps, innovative life of its subject. Not simply a rock-and-roll musical bedrooms romp, Love's life is far enough out of the mainstream, or even the alternate streams, to offer challenges to many of the values we take for granted in living our lives. Things such as safety, stability, and even hygiene are thrown out the window in a life that reads like the outsider fiction of Hesse or Kerouac, only with more electric guitars.
Book Description
Courtney Love. The girl with the most cake. The girl with the loudest mouth and the fiercest guitar. The girl of many talents -- not least among them the power to shock. Not since Madonna declared that she was like a virgin has someone in the public spotlight so consistently challenged the notion of what it means to be female -- and what it means to be well behaved. In Courtney Love: The Real Story, Poppy Z. Brite tells the whole truth about the lead singer of the band Hole and uncovers more about this pop culture heroine than any music magazine could ever hope to.
Replete with revealing details and photographs, information from Love's inner circle, and excerpts from Love's diaries and letters, this book has the intimacy of secrets told to a friend and delivers revelation after revelation. With equal parts compassion and black humor, Brite chronicles the turbulent lives of Love and introduces us to Love Michelle Harrison, the troubled girl who would be queen of postpunk rock, and her childhood spent shuttled from reform school to former stepfathers to family friends. As a precocious, flamboyant teenager, she hung around backstage after concerts, soaking up the star power she knew she had to possess one day, and then traveled to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to work as a stripper. Brite also takes us to new-wave Liverpool and to that citadel of grunge, Seattle, to see Courtney come of age in the circus that became alternative music, dishing much along the way about some of the biggest stars of that show from past and present.
Brite also sets the story straight about Love's life with Kurt Cobain; the allegations of her drug use that surrounded the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean; and the wreckage of Cobain's suicide. But what emerges out of all the drama is a woman determined not only to survive, but to succeed more than anyone ever expected. As seen from her stunning performance as the wife of the publisher of Hustler magazine in The People vs. Larry Flynt, and her transformation into a runway acolyte, she just may catapult herself out of the mosh pit and into the mainstream.
Only Poppy Z. Brite, the acclaimed author of literary horror fiction, whom Publishers Weekly called "a singularly talented chronicler of her generation," could have written this outrageous, comic, and ultimately moving tale of ferocious femininity and fishnet stockings. Courtney Love: The Real Story is a no-holds-barred biography that is as raw as a three-chord punk song -- a work that is as uncompromising and as unforgettable as its subject.
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