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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.

The daughter of esteemed writer Paula Fox and the mother of Courtney Love relates “the curse of the first-born daughter” that has haunted four generations of her family

As an adopted child, Linda Carroll created a magical world of her own, made up of dramatic adventures and the abiding fantasy that her real mother would come and take her away. When she finds herself pregnant at the age of eighteen, she is determined to have the perfect understanding with her child that she lacked with her adoptive mother. But readers will know better, for that baby grows up to be Courtney Love, desperately attention-seeking, deeply troubled, and one of the most talented women in rock.
Even as a baby, Courtney is beset by mood swings that no doctor can explain or cure. Her dark moods and paranoia escalate as she grows up, driving mother and daughter apart. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, Linda finally decides to find her own biological mother, and end the estrangement of generations of first-born daughters.
Her Mother’s Daughter is Linda Carroll’s story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter, a childlike hippie mother, and a woman determined to find herself before finding her roots. Set apart from the typical celebrity memoir by Carroll’s gifted storytelling, Her Mother’s Daughter gives a fresh perspective on the elusive yet enduring connections between mothers and daughters, and reveals the true history of the wildly confabulatory Courtney Love.

"I am not a woman. I'm a force of nature."

Courtney Love knows exactly what she is. She created herself: demon diva, goddess of grunge, media super-icon, wife of the late rock megastar Kurt Cobain. Lead singer of the band Hole, her persona is larger than life -- bellowing, ranting, riling up the masses. She was made for the spotlight, and she rules it like a dark angel, her on- and offstage presence seething with such power, venom, and raw sexual fury that she obliterates everyone else on the music scene today.

"I want to be the girl with the most cake."

Courtney Love may have achieved her goal of becoming a self-made celebrity, but her hungry climb to fame wasn't easy. It took her from a troubled childhood to the sleazy underworld of strip joints to the hardcore drug scene. She was institutionalized as a juvenile delinquent, tormented as a rock groupie, and driven to near suicide as a grieving widow. Then there was her tumultuous relationship with Kurt Cobain -- a sweet-and-sour marriage of twisted passion that ended tragically with a shotgun blast.

Here at last the true Courtney Love is revealed...the headstrong hellraiser in a baby-doll dress...the raucous performer ripping up the airwaves, at war with her public image and herself...the unstoppable survivor forever rising from the ashes only to burn more brightly....