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
