Courtney Love: The Real Story (Paperback)

What killed it for me was probably the prologue. Poppy Z. Brite explains how Courtney Love had rented a home in Louisiana where she was recording her third album "Celebrity Skin". She talks about how Love called her up and the two went out for the evening. Apparently, this encounter inspired Brite to write the book. She claims that she did not have Love's complete approval for the book, but that having her as a friend helped the writing process. Right there, the reader knows that he or she is not getting an unbiased opinion. You can't be someone's friend and be a nonpartisan recorder of their life. And normally, that would be fine: write the Official Courtney Love-approved biography of Courtney Love. Isn't that what Michael Azzerad did with COME AS YOU ARE? However, Brite then goes on to state that she is not going to defend or condemn Love but simply chronicle her life in the most accurate manner possible. That is where she lost all of her credibility.

Throughout the book, Poppy Z. Brite constantly defends Love and sarcastically puts down her detractors, with a few harmless exceptions. Love's father is portrayed as self-centered and senile from the first page, Kat Bjelland kicks Courtney out of her own band (twice) and claims to want to kill her (although somehow the two end up friends after Kurt's death), even the L.A. Department of Social Services is out to steal Frances Bean. While I highly doubt the claims of Love-bashers that Courtney turned Cobain onto heroin and drove him to suicide, I also doubt that Courtney was always the victim. What is more, there were too many gaps in the story of a woman whose life story is far too complex to be told in a mere 230 pages. We find out when Courtney lost her virginity, hear tales of her being tied up and beaten with a fish by a crazed drama/drag-queen, and lots of other steamy details, but life slows down suddenly when Love starts her band and releases her first record. The book just spreads to thin in some of these parts. What's the meaning behind songs like the vitriolic "Violet" and the bittersweet "Doll Parts". The gaps get even wider after Cobain's death, and by the end, we are left to assume that Love will maintain her relationship with stable, sweet co-star Edward Norton (The People vs. Larry Flynt). A far cry from where she is today, although fair enough given that Brite's tale ended in 1996.

Overall, I found the writing style of this book to be poor as well. Referring to Love's crush on Cobain as a "girl-boner" isn't exactly high-quality journalism. Quotes from firsthand sources are few in this book and Brite fills in what she doesn't know with her own judgments about the people in Love's tumultuous life. Perhaps what can be gained from this book is a sense of understanding of a woman whose aggressive persona stems from frustration at having been held-down for so many years throughout her childhood that she feels the need to lash out any threat against her dignity. My advice to potential readers is to read this book along with WHO KILLED KURT COBAIN? While both accounts are highly biased and border on fiction, somewhere in the middle the truth likely lingers.

Certainly a noble cause. And it's especially impressive that she'd attempt to write a nonbiased biography, being Courtney's friend. This is one of the reasons I think this book fails as an accurate and unbiased chronicle. You can't turn to the media for solid information on Courtney Love, because there are several different versions of every story about her. And you can't turn to Courtney Love for solid information on herself, because she's the one that gave the media all that misinformation. (This is a woman who's provided three conflicting accounts of her own NAME: over the years, she's variously claimed her birthname to be Courtney Michelle Harrison, Love Michelle Harrison, and Michelle Love Harrison.)

The publishers certainly must have sensed sensationalism. If they'd put an unflattering picture of Love on the cover of the book, it would utterly change the meaning of the phrase "The Real Story." But they chose to put a glowing, smiling, recent photo of her on the cover. For this reason, the book itself screams "shamelessly authorized biography" even before you open it up.

I have no idea how much of this material is true and how much is false. I'm not really a hardcore fan of Courtney Love, so I haven't read enough Courtneylore to know how many different versions of every single story there are. I am, however, a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan, so I personally can account for the misinformation about lead singer Billy Corgan in this book. For one thing, Brite states that Billy is one inch shorter than Courtney. That would make Courtney six and a half feet tall. This is undoubtedly one of the many "facts" Brite obtained directly from Courtney and placed in the book unquestioningly, without doing any backup research to see if she might be lying. (In almost any major article on the Smashing Pumpkins you can find, the journalist makes some comment - however fleeting - about Billy Corgan's surprising tallness.)

Courtney has often talked about how Billy comforted her after Kurt Cobain's death. For a few years after the fact, she even made it sound as if they'd had sex. Only recently did she admit that they didn't have sex, but said Billy did help her a lot in moving on with her life. In "The Real Story," he has no role in the comforting process at all. Being as how he's never said anything about it, Courtney is once again the only source of information - and Brite takes her current word for it without doing the background research and finding all the other, conflicting, things she's said on the subject.

Finally, Celebrity Skin. Probably anyone reading this review is familiar with the infamous Celebrity Skin wars, in which Billy and Courtney went back and forth in the media over how large of a role he had in making the album. In response to his assertation that he'd written six songs, Courtney said that he'd barely done any work at all. In "The Real Story," he calls her up, offering to help her on the album, and doesn't stop helping her until he's completely exhausted. At no point does Courtney ask him to leave. In various other versions of the story, SHE calls HIM up, asking him to help, and only lets him do some of the work, despite his willingness to do more.

There are most definitely more, but I don't know enough about Hole or Nirvana to point them out. It is, however, dubious that Kurt Cobain would have an "obsession" with guns. And then there's Hank Harrison, who's been given all the three-dimensional personality of a comic book supervillain. Like another reviewer mentioned, every man in Courtney's life is portrayed as having been bent on doing her in, while she's always well-meaning. This is the kind of problematic manuscript that results from trying to write a biography about a friend of yours - and assuming that your friend is always going to impart to you "the REAL story" about her life.

This book says more about Courtney Love than any factual biography could. Does she really see herself as the victim she's portrayed as in this book? If she didn't before, why did she suddenly change her perception of herself at the time of this book's publication - 1997? And why in God's name does she feel the need to lie about stupid, insignificant things like her birthname or Billy Corgan's height?

Whether or not she was in fact administered LSD at the age of 4 (or age 2, or 3, as she's claimed in various interviews), this account screams of a little girl whose painful childhood prompted her to escape into her own dreamworld - and whose talkative nature invited countless music journalists into that world.