Courtney Love: The Real Story
By Poppy Z. Brite
Simon and Schuster, 234 pages, $25
Courtney Love is the cover-girl chameleon for these conflicted times. One minute she seems to be the screaming riot grrrl of female alternative rock. The next minute she seems to be the new Hollywood discovery, the unexpected star of the film “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” The next minute she seems to be the glamor fashion plate of the moment, made up and made over, suddenly a trendsetter counted among “America’s most stylish women.”
And all these larger-than-life personas have come to pass before Love is even 33.
Poppy Z. Brite’s “Courtney Love: The Real Story” is a fast-paced, sometimes-insightful look at a young life that has managed to encompass tragedy and triumph and wretched excess of all sorts. Brite, a New Orleans writer of Gothic fantasy novels, has navigated through eddies of rumor and hearsay swirling around the controversial Love and managed to steer a steady, mostly even-handed course.
This is not an unauthorized biography, but it is not exactly authorized either. Love had telephoned Brite, as an admirerer of her novels, and they had gotten together in Brite’s New Orleans home and become acquaintances, if not close friends. When Brite decided to write a book about her, Love opened doors to some friends and associates but didn’t grant interviews to Brite herself. So Brite gained access to some of Love’s previously unpublished journals and letters, and Love was given a chance to read Brite’s manuscript before it was published, although Brite insists Love had no veto power over what it contained.
Love has already been the subject of oceans of media ink, but Brite estimates that perhaps 40 percent of her book is new material, especially in the portions devoted to Love’s chaotic upbringing and her torturous teen years, when she went from reform schools in Oregon to working as a stripper in such distant locales as Asia, Europe and Alaska.
Brite presents an unvarnished and often frightful portrait of the relationship between Love and Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain. By Brite’s account, they were two people who seemed perfectly right for each other: “We lock like a locket,” Love writes a friend.
But they were also perfectly wrong for each other: Their initial intimacy followed a 6 a.m. phone call from Cobain asking, “Can I come over? Do you have any drugs?” They managed to feed each other’s neediness and insecurities with heroin and many pharmaceuticals until they became almost caricatures of junkie rock stars, exalted by millions while on a fast track toward death.
That Love and their daughter have managed to survive Cobain’s shotgun suicide may be one of the most surprising parts of her story, since so much of her life seems to be slavishly focused on her own interests and career, what Love refers to in a letter as “my own shtick.”
But, as Brite said, “Courtney Love was as completely selfish and self-centered as any star or diva until her daughter was born, then her focus shifted to make as good a life as she could for her.”
