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David Hollenbach

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The Courtney Love Library

Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love (Doubleday). Linda Carroll's fairy tale–like multigenerational saga. More info at: www.hermothersdaughter.net.

Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love (Faber). Courtney opens the kimono on her private files. Due in November.

Love Kills: The Assassination of Kurt Cobain (Arkives). Courtney's dad tells his side. Due soon after Courtney's book.

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Henry Holt). The National Book Critics Circle– honored life story of Courtney's grandma, Paula Fox, concluding with her reunion with long-lost daughter Linda Carroll—a rare scene of bliss in Fox's rigorously stark oeuvre. "I seem to abjure sentimentality," she has said.

Courtney Love: The Real Story (Simon & Schuster). Gender-bending horror novelist Poppy Z. Brite tells an extraordinarily pro-Courtney story. Some episodes (e.g., Courtney chasing Vanity Fair nemesis Lynn Hirschberg under cigar-chomping Jodie Foster's table at an Oscar party, threatening to brain her with Tarantino's Oscar) read like fiction.

Bongwater (Grove Press). Michael Hornburg's roman à clef about Courtney and the Portland boho life. Made into a Luke Wilson/Alicia Witt movie (Image Entertainment), though the definitive Courtney impression on film is by Chloe Webb in Sid & Nancy (Criterion).

Courtney Love: Queen of Noise (Pocket). Courtney commissioned, then quit cooperating with, biographer Melissa Rossi (aka Babs Babylon), an ex–Portland and Seattle Weekly nightlife columnist. Rossi's best on Courtney's Portland milieu, less reliable on her family.

Nirvana: Fudge Packin, Crack Smokin, Satan Worshippin Motherfuckers (Hyperion). Britt Collins and Victoria Clarke's bio of Kurt, Courtney, and company was retitled Flower Sniffin', Kitty Pettin', Baby Kissin' Corporate Rock Whores, then shelved by publishers after Kurt and Courtney, terrified that the women had spoken to Hirschberg, went on the warpath against it. The manuscript is benign to the point of dullness, but Kurt and Courtney's famous 5,000-word death-threat rant on the authors' answering machine tape still circulates in samizdat and proves Courtney's verbal flair.

Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Main Street). Courtney plays an important supporting role in the brilliant band bio by Michael Azerrad (editor in chief of eMusic, which just hired away Seattle Weekly music editor Michaelangelo Matos).

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (Hyperion). Courtney is also prominent in Charles Cross' definitive, Timothy White Award–winning bio, which taught her much she did not know.

Tim Appelo

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Some folks have family meetings to air their grievances. In Courtney Love's go-nuclear family, they write books instead, or communicate via courtrooms. Courtney has mouthed off about her parents for decades. Having kept mum for years, Courtney's mom, Linda Carroll, an Oregon therapist, just published Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love (Doubleday, $24.95).

In November, Courtney publishes Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, the lead fall title for prestigious Farrar Straus Giroux's Faber imprint. "It's not intended as any kind of reply to her mother's book," says her editor, Denise Oswald. "It is similar to [Kurt Cobain's] diary in that it will be comprised in part of direct reproductions of her diary pages . . . a bricolage, to borrow from the avant-gardists to whom Courtney is certainly an heir, of original diary entries that span from her childhood to the present day alongside a startling array of personal artifacts." Expect snapshots, couture photography, correspondence, juvenile justice records, medical forms, and original artwork.

And Hank Harrison, Linda's estranged first husband and Courtney's estranged bio dad, plans to publish his retort, tentatively titled Love Kills: The Assassination of Kurt Cobain (Arkives Press), in Dirty Blonde's publicity slipstream. "I will prevail in this debate," Hank insists, promising to deliver his not widely shared views on Cobain's death, a counterbalance to Linda's "maudlin diatribe," the identity of Linda's actual father, plus "dozens of pictures never before seen by anybody."

But the family's penchant for squabbling in print predates the Oprah Book Club era. Courtney's National Book Award–winning grandmother, Paula Fox, wrote a series of novels and memoirs (Borrowed Finery) detailing her own tormented relationship with her mother. Linda calls this written history, now spanning at least four generations, "the curse of the firstborn daughters." It's an epic tale of maternal concern alternating with neglect, mad antics, destructive creativity, and decades of estrangements as cold as liquid nitrogen. Though it's jaw-dropping gossip, it's more than that. Courtney's warlike tribe has cut a vast swath across our culture, and her legacy raises profound questions about personal identity in the face of fate.

How did this one clan, so literary, become so dysfunctional? And will the curse extend to the fifth "first daughter," Kurt Cobain's Love child, Frances Bean Cobain? Linda, in extensive and exclusive interviews granted to Seattle Weekly, reveals the deep roots of Courtney's outrageous public behavior and speculates on the future of the Fox/Carroll/Love/Cobain family.

The story begins with Elsie Fox; she was Linda's grandmother and Courtney's great-grandmother (see family tree), though neither one knew she existed until 13 years ago. Turns out Elsie was Courtney's intellectual wild-child doppelgänger. She partied hard with her husband, Paul Fox, and his cousin Douglas Fairbanks, and wrote screenplays so godawful that Graham Greene called one, Last Train From Madrid, "the worst movie I ever saw."

"They were wild," says Linda. "I think what's fascinating is that Courtney has this showbiz life inside her that emerged with no knowledge that it was in her background." Seven decades before Courtney grabbed Quentin Tarantino's Oscar for Pulp Fiction at a wild Hollywood party, Elsie was hitting the fast lane with Fairbanks, the Australopithecus of Hollywood party animals. "Humphrey Bogart once threw my grandmother in a lake," says Linda. Why? "My grandmother was quite awful." Was she simply outspoken, ahead of her times? "No, she wasn't. She was really mean."

Linda recently looked up Elsie, a nonagenarian in Nantucket. "She answered the door and said, 'Are you a Jehovah's Witness?' I said, 'No, actually I'm your granddaughter.' She was really remarkable, really fun. She was very estranged from my mother. She was very gracious, but she wasn't warm. She was very cold."

This opinion is shared by Elsie's daughter, Paula Fox (Linda's mother). According to Paula, Elsie meant to abort Paula but didn't notice she was pregnant in time, and so dumped her in a foundling home in New York. Passed like a bad penny among friends and relatives, Paula was taken in by a kindly minister. When she finally met mama Elsie at age 5, Paula recalled, "I sensed that if she could have hidden the act, she would have killed me." Instead, Elsie snatched her away for a chaotically itinerant life roaming Manhattan, Florida, Cuba, New Hampshire, and Hollywood.

When Paula was grown, she and Elsie became so estranged that they did not see each other for about 40 years. Paula got even in a series of memoirs and autobiographical novels that Jonathan Franzen ranks higher than Roth, Bellow, and Updike. What's fascinating is the way traits and accusations reverberate down the generations of the Cursed Firstborns. Paula says Elsie flung a glass at her daughter's head—an act echoed decades later when Courtney famously flung items including a glass, a flashlight, a booze bottle, and a microphone stand at people who peeved her. Paula flung herself into books and a bit of Hollywood work. After a bad, brief teenage marriage to a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, she found herself traumatized, penniless—and pregnant. She put Linda up for adoption. Forty-nine years later, when they first met, Paula explained to Linda that she'd given her up because "I thought that you were me, and I was my own mother. I thought that by releasing you at birth, I would ensure you would not have to go through the pain and bewilderment that I went through." Remorseful, Paula has said she tried to reverse the adoption 10 days later, but that doctors refused her any information about Linda's whereabouts. "I think they'd gotten money to place her," Paula told The Guardian of London.