Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
Issue #30
By Courtney Love (Faber & Faber, 304 pages, $35)
By Mia Horberg
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 4:51pm
It’s very rare to find someone straddling the fence when the topic of Courtney Love comes up in conversation. The two extreme reactions are either a) “That bitch is crazy,” or b) “She’s misunderstood!” For those of you who have been chugging haterade, I’d like to point out the fact that I was not enamored of Courtney before reading her memoir, Dirty Blonde, and was initially excited to dislike her even more after reading all about her sexcapades and adventures with drugs. After all, don’t we always feel better about ourselves when we hear about how screwed up other people are? So imagine my surprise when I closed the book with a newfound respect for her intelligence and compassion for her ongoing struggle.
Subsequently released on the heels of her mother Linda Carroll’s memoir, Her Mother’s Daughter, this intimate glimpse of the multidimensional artist isn’t a direct response to her mother’s memoir, nor to any of her haters. Here, Love is able to display her gift for words and observations without the noise of her childlike antics muting her intelligence. While she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Love has always had a platinum tongue.
It’s impossible not to become immediately engaged. The glossy hardcover shows a naked Love, cigarette in hand, superimposed atop a dark bed of lilies. Turn the next coupla pages and you’ll find a heartfelt introduction written by none other than Carrie Fisher (Princess fucking Leia, y’all). Taking a similar autobiographical approach as Kurt Cobain’s posthumous Journals, the pages that follow are put together scrapbook-style, with photographs, pages torn from old journals, notes written on airplane stationery, poetry, lyrics, doctored religious pictures, and an abundance of candid, intelligent thoughts. The book gives the reader the feeling of sitting in the attic of Love’s home, dusting off an old forgotten trunk, and pulling out memories one by one. Some of her most poignant writings and observations were made as a teenager whose voice, intensified by an incredible amount of self-knowledge, acted as a raised fist of feminism. Example: “There is no such thing as Girl Love, because all cool girls are competitive cunts, which is worth loving in itself so it’s OK. Just don’t pretend it’s otherwise! Celebrate the reality!”
One of the best and worst things about this book is that it isn’t constructed in a linear fashion. You can open it at random and find something beautiful and interesting, but each blurb almost begs for expansion. This is what makes Dirty Blonde a perfect coffee-table read but hard to digest from cover to cover. This isn’t to say that chronology is completely missing. The book covers Court’s early years in juvenile detention, the beginnings of her lust for acting and music, her rise to fame, and all the problems in between.
In the process of getting lost and being found again, Dirty Blonde proves Love to be a cartographer slowly charting out a map of herself. She points her compass to the direction she wants to go, makes note of the roads and sand traps to avoid, and slowly, completely finds herself shaking that very sand out of her panties.
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