David Hollenbach

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.