Courtney Love to Spill Secrets in Memoir Next Year
It’s a big season for controversial musical memoirs. First, Morrissey released his long-awaited Autobiography. Now Courtney Love will release her own book in early 2014 through William Morrow at Harper Collins, a source at the publishing house confirms to Rolling Stone.
Courtney Love on Her Memoir, Tour, Nostalgia
As Consequence of Sound notes, the book’s product page recently showed up on Amazon with a release date of mid-December 2013, which the publishers have said is inaccurate. The product description on Amazon says the book explores many juicy subjects: the former Hole singer’s battles with drug addiction; her “tragic romance” with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain; her relationships with Billy Corgan, Trent Reznor and Ed Norton; her “rocky relationship with her hippy parents” and her early days making ends meet as a stripper. It’s described as “a riveting story, too crazy not to be true.”
That story reportedly begins “in the San Francisco counter-culture, maturing within the world of punk and grunge in the 1980s and 1990s.” Though the book is certainly being hyped for its tales of excess and romance, the product description also promises to probe beyond tabloid-bait tidbits, “offering unique insights into the modern rock culture (Love) helped shape, creating an unforgettable portrait of an outspoken, creatively dangerous, undeniably entertaining artist and woman.”
Love spoke about the memoir to Rolling Stone back in June, noting the influence of Patti Smith and Russell Brand on the project.
“I’m writing some of it myself and then I’m co-writing it with Anthony Bozza,” she said. “Yesterday I did four hours on it, the day before that I did five hours on it. Just covering the bases, but I finally have a map of places that need coverage and I can hop around from starting in 1994 and get to 2008 in two sentences. It’s hard for me to be really linear. I’m reading Just Kids again because I know [Patti Smith] wrote that by herself, and My Booky Wook by Russell Brand, which I think is a great book in terms of just his voice. And then I found an old Tallulah Bankhead book where she is very fabulous. So it’s a combination of those three books. [Keith Richards‘] Life was just so bloody long, I didn’t even finish it.”