The ultimate million little pieces: Courtney Love's mom writes book
CORVALLIS, Ore. — The world knows various Courtney Loves — she's the rocker who growled into the microphone as the bandleader of "Hole," one-half of the couple who defined grunge, the actress who delivered an award-winning turn in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and a tabloid regular.
But Linda Carroll knows Love as the baby daughter who saw angels in the clouds and the 7-year-old who started a letter-writing campaign to free a zoo-owned bear from his too-small cage.
Carroll knows, too, the Courtney who wished for death when she was denied a Popsicle, who wandered into a field at age 12 and cut her arms until they bled, who declared emancipation from her family at 16 and was off like a shot to the world beyond.
All of those Courtneys are on display in Carroll's new memoir, "Her Mother's Daughter," (Doubleday, 304 pages), which begins with Carroll's childhood in San Francisco as the adopted daughter of a distant couple, and ends with her search for her birth mother, who turned out to be novelist and children's author Paula Fox.
In between, though, there is Courtney. Carroll has led an adventurous life, rich in friends and full of husbands (four) and children (five). But the book's central struggle is between a young mother and her difficult daughter.
"For the first time in my life, I had a blood relative," Carroll writes of the day Courtney was born. "Even her smell felt familiar to me. I would pass some of myself on to Courtney, characteristics I would recognize as she grew ... Courtney and I would be enough for each other."
An exercise in catharsis
Carroll, who has the same blond hair and water-blue eyes as her famous daughter, now lives in Corvallis and works as a psychotherapist. Her cozily cluttered home is full of family pictures.
But for years, every so often, the phone would shatter the ordinariness of her life and on the other end would be Courtney, or news of Courtney, Carroll said — she was in rehab, or out again, had lost custody of her daughter or was fighting to regain it. Sometimes came word that Love had lashed out against her mother, telling journalists that she'd been forced to live in a chicken coop, or abandoned at a young age.
Carroll said the book was an exercise in catharsis, prompted by her hope that she could help others not to repeat her own mistakes. "I know the power of hearing other people's stories," she said.
Brightness and despair
As Carroll tells it, Courtney was bright and charming, but out-of-control too. Carroll sent Courtney to live with a series of friends and family, shuttled her out of different schools and tried various medications. There were brief moments of brightness, and many more of despair.
"I could have done better with her," Carroll says now. "But I don't know if it would have made a difference. We make our kids better or worse, but we don't make them who they are. I didn't create her brain chemistry."
Early buzz about the book has chewed on a few salacious moments: Courtney, at age 4, her parents divorced, returning from a visit with her father and complaining about the "magic pills" he'd made her swallow. Or preteen Courtney, drunk on apple wine at a family Christmas celebration.
The selectively leaked excerpts triggered peremptory sniping from Love's manager, who termed it, "astonishing, and profoundly depressing, that any mother would write a book containing numerous allegations about her own young daughter. We strongly suggest that the book be viewed for what it is, a work of vicious and greedy fiction."
Carroll is tart in her reply, suggesting that Love's entourage "might want to read the book first." Backlash from her eldest daughter — who was not given drafts to review — was probably inevitable, she said.
She doesn't know whether Love will ever read the book but hopes granddaughter Frances Bean Cobain will someday.
"I believe (Courtney's) life has been hell, excrutiatingly painful," Carroll said. "As her mother, she looked to me to make things better, and I couldn't. No one, including her mother, knew how to help her life be different."
