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.


From Library Journal
Cult novelist Brite used inside connections to create this portrait of rocker/film star/widow Love.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly, Dana Kennedy
... the chilling details of Love's childhood from hell are what save this book from being just another celebrity clip job. While the latter chapters mostly rehash old stories, Brite, who had access to court records and some of Love's journals, describes her nightmarish family and her stints in foster homes, reform schools, and strip clubs so effectively that the book briefly transcends its genre. It's a snapshot of a '60s hippie couple and their abysmal child-rearing practices that would be fascinating even if Love weren't famous.


Review
Entertainment WeeklyExpect revelations galore about Courtney Love....


Review
Entertainment Weekly Expect revelations galore about Courtney Love....


Book Description
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.Replete with revealing details and photographs, information from Love's inner circle, and excerpts from Love's diaries and letters, this book has the intimacy of secrets told to a friend and delivers revelation after revelation. With equal parts compassion and black humor, Brite chronicles the turbulent lives of Love and introduces us to Love Michelle Harrison, the troubled girl who would be queen of postpunk rock, and her childhood spent shuttled from reform school to former stepfathers to family friends. As a precocious, flamboyant teenager, she hung around backstage after concerts, soaking up the star power she knew she had to possess one day, and then traveled to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to work as a stripper. Brite also takes us to new-wave Liverpool and to that citadel of grunge, Seattle, to see Courtney come of age in the circus that became alternative music, dishing much along the way about some of the biggest stars of that show from past and present.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 performance 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.Only Poppy Z. Brite, the acclaimed author of literary horror fiction, whom Publishers Weekly called "a singularly talented chronicler of her generation," could have written this outrageous, comic, and ultimately moving tale of ferocious femininity and fishnet stockings. Courtney Love: The Real Story is a no-holds-barred biography that is as raw as a three-chord punk song -- a work that is as uncompromising and as unforgettable as its subject.


Simon & Schuster
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


About the Author
Poppy Z. Brite is the author of the novels The Lazarus Heart, Exquisite Corpse, Lost Souls, and Drawing Blood and of the short story collection Wormwood, and the editor of the anthologies Love in Vein and Love in Vein 2. Brite lives in New Orleans with her husband, Christopher.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ForewordI've seen your revulsionAnd it looks real good on you -- Courtney Love,"Teenage Whore"Courtney Love calls me one night. I don't question how she got my unlisted number; people like her have Ways. She's in New Orleans; she liked my novel Lost Souls; do I want to go do something? I invite her over. She arrives three and a half hours late, flops down on my couch with her legs sprawled out, drinks half a Diet Coke, and fills my living room with crackling energy and rapid-fire conversation.She wears a black vintage dress, black hose, strappy highheeled asskicker shoes. Her eyes are a startling sea-foam green, very large and very clear. She chain-smokes, but refuses our joint ("I can't smoke pot"). She is clear-eyed, friendly, and extremely articulate. She rules the room.When we go out to a Cajun restaurant on Decatur Street with our assorted boyfriends, Courtney plugs in hour's worth of songs into the jukebox. Some gloomy old British stuff. Siouxsie, Echo and the Bunnymen. Lots of R.E.M.; she loves Michael Stipe. We try to convince her to have the excellent rabbit and sausage jambalaya, but Courtney says she can't eat bunny. She doesn't like the seafood gumbo she orders instead.Toward the end of the meal, another diner approaches our table. Courtney sort of huddles into herself. The woman does not address Courtney, but points a finger at her and says to Courtney's date, "She looks just like Courtney Love!""Uh, she's not," he says politely.The woman retreats. A minute later she returns and actually taps him on the shoulder. "You answered that so fast -- almost like you were used to saying it!"Courtney speaks. "It's just that I get it all the time and it gets annoying."Now the woman is insulted. The date tries to distract her, asking what she does for a living. Turns out she's a tourist from New Jersey in town for some convention. "I'm just a normal person, the kind who pays rock stars' salaries -- ""I'M A STRIPPER, I DON'T GET A SALARY. WOULD YOU PLEASE GO AWAY?"Our waitress intervenes, steers the irate fan away from the table, comes back and asks if we want her to slap the bitch around. We decline, but leave her a big tip.Outside, Courtney leers at me. "Welcome to my nightmare!"For her, it is the tip of a large and treacherous iceberg. For me, it's a revelation.At one point while we were still in my apartment, Courtney upended her purse looking for something. I find two items of makeup under my couch later: a Poppy eyeshadow in Mushroom and a MAC lipstick in Diva. There are no coincidences.When I get what I want then I never want it again-- Courtney Love,"Violet"1997I finish this book. It wasn't her idea, but obviously having Courtney as a friend made the researching of it easier. It did not, however, make the writing any easier. In fact, I found it somewhat unnerving having a character who might actually call me up while I was writing about her.During the course of my work, Courtney went through a great many changes in her public and private life. She was only a couple of years older than I, and I knew I still had plenty of-growing up to do; I didn't expect her to stay static. But when you're writing a biography of a living, very active, extremely visible character, it can be hard to know where to stop.Courtney Love has always been surrounded by chaos, triumph, pain, and glamour. Some of it has been beyond her control; some of it she has created herself, either unwittingly or deliberately. She has been presented as a gold digger, a saint, a cartoon character, a heroine, a martyr, and a role model.In the media, Courtney has been dissected, analyzed, and stitched back up again. Her behavior, her sex life, her wardrobe, her music, her acting, and, most recently, her fashion sense and style have become topics of intense interest all over the world. She has been slapped (and has occasionally plastered herself) with numerous and conflicting labels: riot grrrl, rock star, feminist, antifeminist, drug addict, musical trailblazer, brave widow, slut, bitch, new Hollywood talent.The purpose of this book is not to condemn or defend Courtney Love -- everyone seems to feel obliged to do one or the other -- but to chronicle the first thirty-two years of her fascinating life as accurately as possible.Copyright © 1997 by Poppy Z. BriteForewordI've seen your revulsionAnd it looks real good on you -- Courtney Love,"Teenage Whore"Courtney Love calls me one night. I don't question how she got my unlisted number; people like her have Ways. She's in New Orleans; she liked my novel Lost Souls; do I want to go do something? I invite her over. She arrives three and a half hours late, flops down on my couch with her legs sprawled out, drinks half a Diet Coke, and fills my living room with crackling energy and rapid-fire conversation.She wears a black vintage dress, black hose, strappy highheeled asskicker shoes. Her eyes are a startling sea-foam green, very large and very clear. She chain-smokes, but refuses our joint ("I can't smoke pot"). She is clear-eyed, friendly, and extremely articulate. She rules the room.When we go out to a Cajun restaurant on Decatur Street with our assorted boyfriends, Courtney plugs in hour's worth of songs into the jukebox. Some gloomy old British stuff. Siouxsie, Echo and the Bunnymen. Lots of R.E.M.; she loves Michael Stipe. We try to convince her to have the excellent rabbit and sausage jambalaya, but Courtney says she can't eat bunny. She doesn't like the seafood gumbo she orders instead.Toward the end of the meal, another diner approaches our table. Courtney sort of huddles into herself. The woman does not address Courtney, but points a finger at her and says to Courtney's date, "She looks just like Courtney Love!""Uh, she's not," he says politely.The woman retreats. A minute later she returns and actually taps him on the shoulder. "You answered that so fast -- almost like you were used to saying it!"Courtney speaks. "It's just that I get it all the time and it gets annoying."Now the woman is insulted. The date tries to distract her, asking what she does for a living. Turns out she's a tourist from New Jersey in town for some convention. "I'm just a normal person, the kind who pays rock stars' salaries -- ""I'M A STRIPPER, I DON'T GET A SALARY. WOULD YOU PLEASE GO AWAY?"Our waitress intervenes, steers the irate fan away from the table, comes back and asks if we want her to slap the bitch around. We decline, but leave her a big tip.Outside, Courtney leers at me. "Welcome to my nightmare!"For her, it is the tip of a large and treacherous iceberg. For me, it's a revelation.At one point while we were still in my apartment, Courtney upended her purse looking for something. I find two items of makeup under my couch later: a Poppy eyeshadow in Mushroom and a MAC lipstick in Diva. There are no coincidences.When I get what I want then I never want it again-- Courtney Love,"Violet"1997I finish this book. It wasn't her idea, but obviously having Courtney as a friend made the researching of it easier. It did not, however, make the writing any easier. In fact, I found it somewhat unnerving having a character who might actually call me up while I was writing about her.During the course of my work, Courtney went through a great many changes in her public and private life. She was only a couple of years older than I, and I knew I still had plenty of-growing up to do; I didn't expect her to stay static. But when you're writing a biography of a living, very active, extremely visible character, it can be hard to know where to stop.Courtney Love has always been surrounded by chaos, triumph, pain, and glamour. Some of it has been beyond her control; some of it she has created herself, either unwittingly or deliberately. She has been presented as a gold digger, a saint, a cartoon character, a heroine, a martyr, and a role model.In the media, Courtney has been dissected, analyzed, and stitched back up again. Her behavior, her sex life, her wardrobe, her music, her acting, and, most recently, her fashion sense and style have become topics of intense interest all over the world. She has been slapped (and has occasionally plastered herself) with numerous and conflicting labels: riot grrrl, rock star, feminist, antifeminist, drug addict, musical trailblazer, brave widow, slut, bitch, new Hollywood talent.The purpose of this book is not to condemn or defend Courtney Love -- everyone seems to feel obliged to do one or the other -- but to chronicle the first thirty-two years of her fascinating life as accurately as possible.Copyright © 1997 by Poppy Z. BriteChapter OneIt was autumn in San Francisco, the season of the witch, 1964. Somebody in the Haight was giving a party for jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, and Hank Harrison was invited. Hank believed himself to have a standing invitation to any party in San Francisco, whether anyone had actually invited him or not; his music connections got him in everywhere.Hank was going places. His old college buddy Phil Lesh played bass with a hot band called the Warlocks, and Hank was always bragging that Phil could get him a gig in the music business anytime. He would later claim to have managed the Warlocks, who in 1965 would change their name to the Grateful Dead.Heavy-set and round-faced, with a humped nose, a scruffy black mustache, and a hairline that was beginning to recede, Hank was nobody's pretty boy. But he was a loquacious charmer. His gift of gab and his music connections got him plenty of girls, and that night at Dizzy Gillespie's party, they got him Linda Risi.Linda was a naive rich girl on her own for the first time. A San Francisco native, she had grown up on ritzy Nob Hill and gone to Catholic school. Now she was nineteen and adrift in the city, swayed by the burgeoning vibes of the sixties. Blonde and slender, neat and WASPish, she didn't blend into the Haight-Ashbury crowd. That was why she caught Hank's attention.The adopted daughter of an optician (and an heiress to the Bausch optical fortune), raised in the Catholic church, Linda had come to San Francisco upon reaching her majority. Like so many other young people in that city, in that year, she was looking for something she couldn't identify or explain. She didn't find it in Hank Harrison, but for a while she thought she had. They left the party together that night, and staggered up and down the steep sidewalks of the magically lit, carnival-like Haight until they reached Hank's dingy apartment.Linda was already pregnant when she married Hank in Reno a few months after they met. Hank kept feeding her a line about how the combination of their genes -- his brains and her looks -- would produce the perfect child. Linda had no way of knowing that half of Hank's genes came from a violently alcoholic father, and, being adopted, she knew nothing about her own genes. (Linda would later allegedly discover that her biological father had been a psychiatrist from New York, and his father had been a Jewish psychoanalyst from Vienna, but since she was a well known therapist herself by the time of this "discovery," it must be taken with a grain of salt.)Hank has since claimed that Linda refused to use birth control because of her religious beliefs. Whatever the case, Linda could not have given up the baby even if Hank had wanted her to. Her own adoptive father had been an abusive drunk, and Linda considered herself an outcast, a person with no family at all. This baby would be the first blood relative she had ever known.Linda Harrison nurtured her fetus in a heady broth of fear and sugar: she constantly craved candy, cookies, any kind of sweets. She gained weight, vomited all the time, felt that pregnancy had made her hideously ugly. Hank, already getting bored with the relationship, did nothing to allay her fears.At 9:15 A.M. on July 9, 1965, at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, Linda gave birth to a daughter whose birth certificate read Love Michelle Harrison. The labor had been long and wrenchingly painful. Linda tried to imagine what her baby must have felt, expelled from the cradling womb, constricted for hours in the tight tube of muscle. She imagined that the child had been frightened and furious, and had taken out every ounce of it on her.Hank was not in attendance at the birth. Sleeping late after a Warlocks gig, possibly. Who knew? But Linda and the other freaks made an occasion of the birth anyway: Courtney would later claim that they had stewed Linda's placenta with onions and eaten it.Linda, now twenty, adored her daughter helplessly. She had no idea how to care for a baby, though she was sure she had the good "instincts" of every hippie mama. That hungry pink mouth tugging on her heavy breasts, those fierce eyes staring up at her with disquieting awareness -- these quickly became the most important things in Linda's life. No child ever had a needier mother, and the baby must have sensed the chasm of Linda's emotional dependence.Even then, though, Linda's feelings toward her daughter were ambivalent. Love Michelle didn't always act like a normal baby. She did frightening things: stiffened and screamed upon being cuddled; cried until she all but passed out from lack of oxygen. A photograph taken of the Harrison family at Christmas 1965 shows Linda sitting stiffly with a strained smile on her pretty face, legs crossed at the knee, ignoring the arm Hank has draped around her shoulders; she is distinctly looking away from the baby and does not appear to be touching her. The baby has a lost look, and her hands are reaching toward Linda.The Harrisons lived in a big Victorian house that Linda's parents had paid for. As well as supporting Hank, Linda often cooked for a ragtag assortment of musicians, groupies, and street urchins. The baby grew up in a fantasy world partly of her own design, partly sketched in by the freaks and artists around her. None of these happy hippie dreamers, though, suspected how dark the child's own inner world was. The earliest dreams she remembered were nightmares of skeletal wraiths, deformed internal organs, poisoned milk (the latter a motif that would recur in her poetry and her later songwriting).Meanwhile, the people around her wanted her to "act like a flower," to "dance like springtime." She was encouraged to stretch her imagination, and occasionally was helped along with a bit too much zeal. When she was four years old, she has said, her father gave her LSD. (She has no memory of this, but later, during the Harrisons' divorce, Linda and one of Hank's girlfriends would testify that it was so in child-custody court.)The effects of LSD on a four-year-old are difficult to speculate upon. LSD is best known for causing hallucinations, which may have been especially frightening to an already disturbed child. But LSD also causes introspection and heady flights of imagination. How different would the experience have seemed from her usual highly subjective reality? Did she have a bad trip, and what would a four-year-old's bad trip be like? Did she tap into some well of preconsciousness that adults could never hope to access? Did she even notice?She has said that her father was involved in the manufacture and sale of LSD in those days, and that he may have supplied the Dead. If so, his acid was probably clean and pure. Though the experience can be psychologically damaging, LSD itself causes no physical harm to the brain or body. Perhaps she just saw colors and pretty lights; perhaps it was even a temporary escape from the confusion of her everyday life.Although everything was supposed to be peace and love, her parents fought all the time and her father scared her. She was glad when Linda told her that Hank would be moving out for good.Linda and Hank divorced in 1970, and both sued for custody of their daughter. In the ensuing trial, the charges of Hank's having dosed the child were brought out, and custody was awarded to Linda, who promptly changed her five-year-old daughter's first name to Courtney after a woman she'd known during her pregnancy. "Love" apparently no longer applied to the product of her union with Hank.Soon after the divorce, Hank disappeared with a Deadhead girl and Linda married again. Love's father had been horrible, but it looked as if Courtney's stepfather might be a nice man.Frank Rodriguez was a schoolteacher from Portland, and the organizer of that city's Kite Day. He talked to Courtney like a real adult talking to a real child, not in the unfiltered hippie psychobabble she was used to hearing. He also legally adopted her and gave her his surname. Frank was the first (and possibly the only) benevolent authority figure in her life. Tellingly, she began calling him "Daddy" as soon as he and Linda were married, and Hank became "BioDad.""Courtney was a wonderful child," Frank told Premiere years later. "She had a strong will. There were things she didn't want to do. I wanted her to dress in saddle shoes. But she hated them. She wanted Mary Janes. We went round and round about that kind of stuff. Boy, she sure has gotten them now."The Rodriguez family relocated to Eugene, Oregon, where Linda started attending psychology classes at the university. Soon she had decided psychological work was her true calling, and the entire family underwent therapy at her behest.Linda and Frank had two daughters together, Jaimee and Nicole. With other children around, even babies, Courtney felt like the outcast again. Her behavior became increasingly moody, even violent. She made disturbing crayon drawings of terrible things happening to her baby half sisters. Linda apparently became resentful because coping with Courtney's problems began to encroach on her time with her two younger daughters. Linda and Frank were having problems, too. They both began seeing other people, and the marriage split up. Though Courtney would keep in touch with Frank, and her own daughter would eventually call him Grandpa, she must have felt that she was losing the only father she'd ever known.He was soon replaced by David Menely, a sportswriter and outdoor-expedition leader Linda met on a river-rafting trip. She brought him home, married him, and asked him to adopt her daughters, giving Courtney her third surname in eight years.David was not as nice as Frank. He had a cynical wit that Courtney admired -- something she recognized in herself -- but he could be vicious. He smoked pot constantly, but it didn't seem to mellow his acerbic personality any, and Courtney associated the smell of pot smoke with BioDad.In 1973, the Menelys moved from Eugene to a nearby commune in Marcola, where they lived in what Courtney later described as a "tepee." It was a large hut with rough-hewn timbers and a packed-earth floor, full of smoke and shared by many other people. The commune discouraged gender "stereotyping," and Courtney was no longer allowed to wear girly clothes or play with dolls, not that she'd ever had many of either. As she had been in the San Francisco house, she was exhorted by the hippies around her to express herself and be creative.But the commune's facilities were worse than primitive. Courtney still talks about how the kids at her school called her "Pee Girl" because no one ever thought to wash her clothes. The photograph on the back of her second album, Live Through This, dates from this period. It shows a little girl standing barefoot on a gravel road, her skin shockingly pale, her long hair golden-brown and stringy. Her plaid shirt is too large, and unbuttoned farther than might be considered appropriate for, say, a school picture. Her expression is indecipherable.In school, Courtney had always performed poorly despite her obvious level of intelligence. Most of the other children shied away from her, and she from them. She was diagnosed by one of her therapists as mildly autistic. To Linda, Courtney seemed to be in pain most of the time: hating to be touched, seething with silent rages, withdrawing into a world where no one else could go. Linda knew something was wrong with her oldest daughter, but no one could tell her exactly what.Now a well-known therapist, Linda recently broke her longstanding silence about her famous daughter to speak to Vanity Fair. "I think that Courtney came with a tremendous sense of pain in her," she told writer Kevin Sessums in 1995. "She's not any different than she was when she was two years old...yet there were times, even as a small child, she would be really, deeply touched by something. And when that would happen, it was as though every part of her went soft for a little while -- including her heart."When she was in the second grade in Eugene, Oregon, she was having a lot of nightmares. I had no idea what to do. I took her to a psychiatrist just to try to find some way to bring her some solace. The psychiatrist said part of the problem with her was that she needed to join Girl Scouts. She needed to be involved in ordinary kid activities. I dutifully went to a Brownies meeting with her...I could tell it was really hard for her to be in the same room with all these kids. The Brownies leader suggested they have an art show. She asked all the kids to draw something. The things that Courtney drew were always startling. She didn't draw sunsets and apple trees. She would draw sort of...wounded figures. I can still see her that day -- her little face so intense with those crayons. At the end of that, the teacher told the troop that they were going to see what drawing they liked the most by holding them up one by one and everyone applauding. I knew that this would be terrible for her. When it got to hers, she just grabbed it and ran over to me, and we left."At that time, when a child was exhibiting the kind of pain Courtney was exhibiting -- a lot of nightmares and a lot of crying and hating school and hating everything -- the treatment was pretty much to try and make that child what they called 'normalized' rather than saying, 'What kind of creature is this, and how can we make her be okay with who she is?' That whole belief system was really awful for her."Courtney's old friend Robin Bradbury offers a different perspective. "I don't know how much of it is true, but she told me stuff like they thought she was a bad influence on her sisters, so they would make her sleep in the shed, and they tried to have her put in a psychiatric place and they did some tests on her and found out that she had a genius IQ, but they [Linda and David] were trying to say she was crazy and keep her away from her sisters...She was a little kid, for God's sake. I just don't think they had time for her."Courtney tells of auditioning for a school production of Snow White around this same time, certain that she was destined to play the lead. "I studied the part of Snow White forever and had it down," she recalls. "And they gave me, without even auditioning me, the part of the Evil Witch." It was clear that school was never going to be a happy experience for her.When Courtney was eight, Linda and David Menely made the surprising decision to move to New Zealand and start a sheep ranch with Linda's Bausch money. It would be a fresh, uncluttered life, Linda thought. She and Courtney had begun to have hysterical fights about trivial matters, fights that sometimes made Linda feel younger and weaker than her own daughter. In keeping with her new, uncluttered life, she arranged to leave Courtney with a therapist friend back in the States.Courtney escaped this abandonment by dreaming of fame, of a time when people would cry and swoon in her very presence. One day she made a clay model of herself and contemplated it with something approaching awe: she had absolute control over this thing, this icon of herself. But control was only a fantasy; in real life she had no say in where she lived, with whom she lived, or even how she was treated. She could mold and crush the clay doll just as the adults in her life could do to her.School had become an active source of terror. Courtney dreamed about keeping tiny people in jars and starving them, about starting a farm for women where she would beat them and make them beautiful. She sneaked Dorals from the therapist friend's purse and invented witchy little rituals in her room. The friend had a son who called Courtney ugly and fat, then tried to do other things when no one was looking -- grabbing at her, touching her with dirty fingers. Courtney sneaked into his bedroom one day, pricked her finger with a pin, and dabbed blood on his pillow. Soon afterward, the friend dispatched Courtney to her family in Nelson, New Zealand, on the north end of the southern island.Even there, Courtney was too much trouble. Though Jaimee and Nicole were living with them on the ranch, Linda and David sent Courtney to stay with another friend. Shirley, though, was nothing like the therapist friend with the beastly son. She was a self-proclaimed spinster with a wonderful collection of books and a garden, and she acted as if she didn't mind having Courtney around, maybe even loved her a little. School in New Zealand wasn't as bad as it had been in the States. For the first time she could remember, Courtney let herself believe that her short, sad life was getting better.But Linda came for a visit and everything went back to hell. Shirley, Linda claimed, had begged her to take Courtney away. Courtney was driving Shirley "crazy" and she "couldn't handle it." Courtney had no idea what she might have done to make Shirley so mad.Was there any truth to Linda's claim? Shirley was a person who valued her privacy; she might well have found the sudden responsibility of caring for a young child overwhelming. Then again, Linda may have been jealous of her daughter's relationship with Shirley, which was obviously more important to Courtney than her relationship with Linda.Whatever the reason, Courtney had to go live on the sheep farm with Linda and David. By this time they had adopted an emotionally disturbed boy. Courtney was not allowed to play with her siblings, and was forced to sleep alone in a tiny hut behind the main house. Courtney spent much of her time sitting in the pasture, daydreaming about being a witch, making little slits in her skin with sharp blades of grass until the blood ran down her inner arms.Linda and David had a son. Courtney found the baby ugly, and thought he had a mean look. When her half brother got sick and died in the hospital before ever coming home, Courtney was afraid she would get blamed for the death somehow. Still, she couldn't help wishing all Linda's babies had died -- all except her. Then Linda would have to love her."I feel like not being here all the time," Courtney told author Amy Raphael in 1994. "I've felt it since I was six or seven. I remember the first time it hit me. I was on a cliff in New Zealand. But I never do anything about it because it's my responsibility not to. If I don't outgrow it in this lifetime, I'm not ever gonna outgrow it."She had a long, long way to go.Copyright © 1997 by Poppy Z. BriteForewordI've seen your revulsionAnd it looks real good on you -- Courtney Love,"Teenage Whore"Courtney Love calls me one night. I don't question how she got my unlisted number; people like her have Ways. She's in New Orleans; she liked my novel Lost Souls; do I want to go do something? I invite her over. She arrives three and a half hours late, flops down on my couch with her legs sprawled out, drinks half a Diet Coke, and fills my living room with crackling energy and rapid-fire conversation.She wears a black vintage dress, black hose, strappy highheeled asskicker shoes. Her eyes are a startling sea-foam green, very large and very clear. She chain-smokes, but refuses our joint ("I can't smoke pot"). She is clear-eyed, friendly, and extremely articulate. She rules the room.When we go out to a Cajun restaurant on Decatur Street with our assorted boyfriends, Courtney plugs in hour's worth of songs into the jukebox. Some gloomy old British stuff. Siouxsie, Echo and the Bunnymen. Lots of R.E.M.; she loves Michael Stipe. We try to convince her to have the excellent rabbit and sausage jambalaya, but Courtney says she can't eat bunny. She doesn't like the seafood gumbo she orders instead.Toward the end of the meal, another diner approaches our table. Courtney sort of huddles into herself. The woman does not address Courtney, but points a finger at her and says to Courtney's date, "She looks just like Courtney Love!""Uh, she's not," he says politely.The woman retreats. A minute later she returns and actually taps him on the shoulder. "You answered that so fast -- almost like you were used to saying it!"Courtney speaks. "It's just that I get it all the time and it gets annoying."Now the woman is insulted. The date tries to distract her, asking what she does for a living. Turns out she's a tourist from New Jersey in town for some convention. "I'm just a normal person, the kind who pays rock stars' salaries -- ""I'M A STRIPPER, I DON'T GET A SALARY. WOULD YOU PLEASE GO AWAY?"Our waitress intervenes, steers the irate fan away from the table, comes back and asks if we want her to slap the bitch around. We decline, but leave her a big tip.Outside, Courtney leers at me. "Welcome to my nightmare!"For her, it is the tip of a large and treacherous iceberg. For me, it's a revelation.At one point while we were still in my apartment, Courtney upended her purse looking for something. I find two items of makeup under my couch later: a Poppy eyeshadow in Mushroom and a MAC lipstick in Diva. There are no coincidences.When I get what I want then I never want it again-- Courtney Love,"Violet"1997I finish this book. It wasn't her idea, but obviously having Courtney as a friend made the researching of it easier. It did not, however, make the writing any easier. In fact, I found it somewhat unnerving having a character who might actually call me up while I was writing about her.During the course of my work, Courtney went through a great many changes in her public and private life. She was only a couple of years older than I, and I knew I still had plenty of-growing up to do; I didn't expect her to stay static. But when you're writing a biography of a living, very active, extremely visible character, it can be hard to know where to stop.Courtney Love has always been surrounded by chaos, triumph, pain, and glamour. Some of it has been beyond her control; some of it she has created herself, either unwittingly or deliberately. She has been presented as a gold digger, a saint, a cartoon character, a heroine, a martyr, and a role model.In the media, Courtney has been dissected, analyzed, and stitched back up again. Her behavior, her sex life, her wardrobe, her music, her acting, and, most recently, her fashion sense and style have become topics of intense interest all over the world. She has been slapped (and has occasionally plastered herself) with numerous and conflicting labels: riot grrrl, rock star, feminist, antifeminist, drug addict, musical trailblazer, brave widow, slut, bitch, new Hollywood talent.The purpose of this book is not to condemn or defend Courtney Love -- everyone seems to feel obliged to do one or the other -- but to chronicle the first thirty-two years of her fascinating life as accurately as possible.Copyright © 1997 by Poppy Z. Brite

FROM OUR EDITORS

In this thorough portrait of the controversial rocker, Brite 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 beyond anyone's expectations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. Replete with never-before-published details, never-before-seen photographs, information from Love's inner circle, and excerpts from Love's diaries and letters, this book has the intimacy of secrets told to a friend and delivers revelation after revelation. 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.

SYNOPSIS

A thorough look at the sensational life of controversial rock icon Courtney Love.

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