Chronicling Courtney: Author Tries To Capture Intriguing Life

“Courtney Love: The Real Story” By Poppy Z. Brite (Simon & Schuster, 234 pages, $25)

Courtney Love is the cover girl chameleon for these conflicted times.

One minute she seems to be the screaming riot grrrl of female alternative rock, the stage-diving, expletive-shouting reincarnation of Jim Morrison of The Doors. The next minute she seems to be the new Hollywood discovery, the unexpected star of “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” The next minute she seems to be the glamour fashion plate of the moment, made-up and made over, suddenly a trendsetter counted among “America’s most stylish women.”

And all these larger-than-life personas have come to pass before Love is even 33 years old.

To write a biography of a person that young seemed odd indeed to Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans writer of gothic, fantasy novels. But the more she looked into Love and her tumultuous life, the more Brite came to see that a biography of Love made some sense, and not only because it had earned her a sixfigure advance far beyond anything she had ever earned for her previous books.

“I soon realized that Courtney Love had lived more in 30 years than many 90-year-olds,” Brite said last week in a Seattle interview.

Brite’s “Courtney Love: The Real Story” is a fast-paced, but sometimes insightful look at a young life that has managed to encompass tragedy and triumph and wretched excess of all sorts. Brite, 30, has navigated through eddies of rumor and hearsay swirling around the controversial Love and managed to steer a steady, mostly even-handed course.

This is not an unauthorized biography, of the type written about Love last year, but it is not exactly authorized either. Love had telephoned Brite, as an admirer of her novels, and they had gotten together in Brite’s New Orleans home and become acquaintances, if not close friends.

When Brite decided to write a book about her, Love acquiesced, opening doors with some friends and associates, although not granting interviews to Brite herself. So Brite gained access to some of Love’s previously unpublished journals and letters, and Love was given a chance to read Brite’s manuscript before it was published, although Brite insists that Love had no veto power over what it contained.

Love has already been the subject of oceans of media ink, but Brite estimates that perhaps 40 percent of her book is new material, especially in the portions devoted to Love’s chaotic upbringing and her torturous teen years, when she went from reform schools in Oregon to working as a stripper in such distant locales as Asia, Europe and Alaska.

“I don’t insist that people should care about Courtney Love by offering the usual spiel about how she is a strong woman who has overcome difficult obstacles, even if it is true,” Brite related. “But the fact is that Courtney Love is a very interesting character who has led a very unusual life, and she exerts a weird fascination for me and many people.”

Brite gives an unvarnished and often frightful portrait of the relationship between Love and Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana lead singer from Aberdeen. By Brite’s account, they were two people who seemed perfectly right for each other - “We lock like a locket,” Love writes a friend.

But they were also perfectly wrong for each other: Their initial intimacy followed a 6 a.m. phone call from Cobain asking, “Can I come over? Do you have any drugs?” They managed to feed each other’s neediness and insecurities with heroin and many pharmaceuticals until they became almost caricatures of junkie rock stars, exalted by millions while on a fast track toward death.

That Love and their daughter have managed to survive Cobain’s shotgun suicide may be one of the most surprising parts of her story. That is especially true since so much of her life seems to be slavishly focused on her own interests and career, what Love refers to in a letter as “my own shtick.”

But, as Brite said, “Courtney Love was as completely selfish and self-centered as any star or diva until her daughter was born, then her focus shifted to make as good a life as she could for her.”

Love has now sold the Seattle mansion she shared with Cobain for $2.9 million, although, as Brite reports, retaining the right to remove a young willow tree there that was fertilized with some of Cobain’s ashes. Love has moved back to Los Angeles, a city she once despised, and has settled into a new life there.

Love is more settled now, but still on the move, her film career put on hold for a time while she works on her next album with her band, Hole. After two years of research and writing about Love, Brite remains ready to be surprised by anything she does.

But Brite remains impressed: “I don’t think most people realize how well-read Courtney Love is, at what level she is able to discourse on a variety of subjects, her sharpness. I don’t think you can meet her and come away thinking she’s a fool, which many people may assume she is from her image, which makes her seem like a cartoon character.”