Courtney Love: The Real Story - Hardcover

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.

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.

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 performances 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.END