“Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love,” published this week, inevitably makes you think that Love is trying to keep pace with her husband, whose journals were published (by her) in 2002. There are certainly similarities. They’re both full of scribbles, scraps and secrets–Love includes her 1976 rejection letter from the Mickey Mouse Club. But with Love, there’s always more than meets the eye. Yes, she’s been a loud, brash, drunk-and-drugged punk-rock princess, but she’s also intelligent and fearless, with a lacerating wit. Through her music, she’s walked a razor’s edge between willful self-destruction and seeking expiation for her sins.
The intimate items Love reveals –scrawled lyrics, photos, poetry, lists and childhood relics–form a collage of a life spent in pursuit of validation, fueled by her relentless creativity. She exposes her painful, obviously influential, relationship with her mother, therapist Linda Carroll. Writing in crayon from boarding school, the 12-year-old Courtney tells a friend that “when I get around [Carroll], I feel so awkward and timid and weak … trying to prove to her that I can make friends and be popular.” Later letters come from inside an Oregon lockdown correctional facility. This book may be the most direct and honest work that Love has done to date. She exposes the fault line inside her where artistry and anger shifted, changed places, and sometimes merged.
Love’s diaries are hitting the shelves just a week after Cobain displaced Elvis at No. 1 on Forbes’s list of the top-earning dead celebrities. Credit Love for that: this year she sold her 25 percent share in the Nirvana catalog, and earned Cobain’s estate $50 million. To some people, Love will always be the wild woman who got rich and famous off her dead husband. But her diaries tell a different story: they make clear that she was determined to get there on her own.
