Sorry if this has been posted i'm in a hurry and can't check over all the other threads.
http://books.aol.com/feature/_a/inte...14180409990001
Courtney Love's first book, 'Dirty Blonde', is touted by its veddy serious and veddy literary publisher as "a multi-textual memoir chronicling the life of one of our most potent pop icons." Whew. That's a big bill to fill -- but in the pastiche-style pages (supposedly facsimiles of Love's diaries and scrapbooks), her many facets do come through: musician, actress, songwriter, wife, mother, fashionista (and sometimes fashion victim).

It's more than a bit disingenuous to call this a "memoir," because what is left out is almost more important than what is included. How does one follow the trajectory of young Courtney Menely's life in foster care, juvenile reform school, and psychiatric institutions? There's no timeline -- but that does highlight her intense, unfettered drive to express herself, even in the darkest days following her rocker husband Kurt Cobain's suicide. From scribbled lyrics to candid snapshots of Frances Bean (her daughter with Cobain) to a photo of the pink satin "Heart Shaped Box" that inspired Nirvana's most famous song, 'Dirty Blonde' is a book that long-time fans and pop-culture fanatics will devour.

AOL's Book Maven Bethanne Patrick talked to Love by phone in New York about the new book and Love's current incarnation as active Buddhist and on-tour author.

Bethanne Patrick: This is AOL's Book Maven Bethanne Patrick, and today I’m speaking with Courtney Love, whose new book, 'Dirty Blonde,' is hitting the bookstores and hopefully bestseller list. Courtney, thanks for being with us today.

Courtney Love: Thanks for having me.

BP: Who’s the book written for?

CL: I don’t know, anybody that is interested in how an artist makes art out of detritus and pain, and anybody that’s gone through, you know, Dickensian childhoods themselves, or -- I think it’s pretty universal. I didn’t really write it as a book for people that were just into me. It’s not like one of these -- I mean, I didn’t write a book sitting with a ghostwriter -- I wouldn’t do it with a ghostwriter anyway. I’d write it myself, if I ever did a book, but where it’s very linear, and it’s like, I was born and a kind of David Copperfield thing.

I think I went with Farrar, Straus & Giroux because -- rather than, say, Simon & Schuster, because they’re very literate, and because they had approached me about wanting to do a poetry book, and in my skill set, I think I do poetry best, and so there's a lot of poetry in it.

BP: The subtitle of the book is 'The Diaries of Courtney Love,' and you just said it wasn’t written for people who are just into you. And the interesting thing here is, it’s really a pastiche, it’s a collage, it’s a scrapbook, it's all kinds of things. But you couldn’t necessarily learn a linear version of Courtney Love’s life through looking at this book. So you learn instead, as you said, about the artist. What else do you think is revealed here?.

CL: You know, I think it's a lot better than going to a magazine and letting the writer decide who I am, and then letting the editor edit what that writer decided who I am. You know, that’s been happening to me my whole career, and I just wanted something that was like, OK, this is me. This is me. This is what I am. This is how I think, this is how -- my thought process, this is how I write lyrics, this is what I’ve gone through. Here’s my food stamp card, and here’s me comparing diamond rings with Liz Taylor, and not that many people have had lives like that, but (laughter) this is me.

BP: And you have a lot of things included in the book, everything from that photo of you comparing diamonds with Liz Taylor to Richard Branson apologizing to you to the container that inspired your husband’s most famous song, "Heart-Shaped Box." Was there anything you deliberately didn’t include in the book?

CL: Oh my God, there’s -- I don’t want to turn anyone off from buying it, but there’s two rooms full of things that aren’t in the book. Believe me, I mean -- I don’t know, for example, someone I dated for four years, and I didn’t put anything about him in. They weren’t -- one of the things about the publishers is they weren’t that bad. There was some correspondence between me and Gwyneth Paltrow that they found, and they kind of really were pressuring me to put it in, and I was like, no, I don’t want to ask her, and -- I put like one thing that was like a text between me and Lindsay Lohan, but that was it. I didn’t really want to put like, "Oh, my date with Mr. Movie Star X went so well."

BP: There is a little note on about John Cusack there that I’m really interested in, but some day we’ll learn. Now --

CL: Wait, wait, is that the Cameron Crowe thing?

BP Right.

CL:That’s not supposed to be in there. That’s not in the book.

BP Wait, wait, this is on the still from the movie. This is on -- the photo of you crouching down.

CL: Oh, oh, OK. OK, all right. I thought you meant -- there was a letter from Cameron Crowe about John Cusack that got taken out, but --

BP No, no, no, not that one. This is on -- I’m trying to remember, what’s the name of the movie, and --

CL: 'Straight to Hell.'

BP Yeah. (laughter) Exactly, exactly. So there it is. There it is. It says, Cusack came for the day, ooh, oh my, I’ll never tell.

CL: And I don’t.

BP And you don’t, you don’t.

BP And you shan’t. It’s provocative. Many of the things in here are provocative. Some of them lead -- they lead you to other stuff, they tantalize the reader. It’s all full of photos and letters and memorabilia. But looking at it now as a finished collection, what seems the lowest point for you? Because your childhood was very troubled, was that the lowest point?

CL: Think the lowest point is, there’s a letter in the beginning of the book to my stepfather, and it’s really upsetting to read it, and it says -- doesn’t say anything like large or huge, like oh, my mother beats me and locks me in the closet, but it says like, you know--because many times I was just sort of dumped off places--and there’d be reports, and like "parents’ whereabouts unknown." And there’s this letter to my stepfather that says, "I always get so timid around my mother," and it’s just a really emotional, scary passage. And I think anybody that has issues with their mother can relate to it. And it also says, and I always want to prove that I’m popular to her or something. It talks about how timid and weak I feel in front of my mother.

BP That’s a theme, too, about wanting to be popular and wanting to be wanted, and of course, many people are fascinated because in your family tree there is such a theme of mothers and daughters --– how shall I put this -- abandoning each other and then coming back together, but the one piece that you abandoned.

CL: ...nonsense my mother made up, actually.

BP (laughter) You’ve never abandoned your own daughter. Now -- and I wanted to ask about the headlines recently, because you had said that you’d gone into recovery with Mel Gibson’s help, and I was wondering about if -- about regrets, and how you feel about staying sober this time around, and how you feel this affects your daughter, who is just a beautiful young woman.

CL Well, I remember living in some squat somewhere and seeing some book, it was French for -- it was like "je ne regrette rien," -- I regret nothing. And I was about 18, and I saw that book, and I thought, yeah, I’m going to be that person.

BP: Are you?

CL: No. (laughter) I’m not. I regret a lot. In terms of Frances, she’s doing really, really, really well, and she’s a great kid, and the nannies didn’t make her a great kid, I did. And I think keeping her -- I’m very upset with Amazon because I really think it’s uncool to put my mother’s exploitation book next to my book. I mean, look, my mother wrote this book, and I really haven’t commented on it, but I will right now, which is, to say basically I was out of the house at the age of 7. So when I read -- I never read the book, but when I read the reviews, and talked about me like throwing pets down the stairs, and -- you know, what pet? I didn’t have a pet... A, B... what stairs? I didn’t live in a house that had stairs. And apparently that happened at age 9. How could it happen at age 9? I didn’t live with her.

BP: You were out of the house.

CL:: I didn’t live with her since I was 7 years old. And I haven’t spoken to her except maybe two times on the phone, and that twice on the phone was to say, f**k off, leave us alone, blah, blah, blah. She never met Kurt, never, so for her to say, oh, you know, all they would talk about was, they had this kind of a relationship, and they would speak about this and this arcana about rock and roll -- she never met Kurt. She never met him. How does she know? She -- in the chapter where she met Edward, she never met Edward. How does she know -- she never met these people. Interesting what -- with one of her daughters, you know, I have this -- was one brother I talk to, and unfortunately I think he’s an alcoholic. I mean, he’s always drunk, so whatever. Maybe he’s not an alcoholic. But he’s always drunk. And I gave him my loft for a while and I put him through Vassar. He ended up being -- and I still speak to him. He came to my Halloween party, and he was so drunk, he was falling down drunk, and like the 10th time I’ve seen him like this, it’s like, oh, yeah, you’ve got this real bunch of real functional kids, Linda.

And then there’s this 'True Hollywood Story' on 'E!', right, and I’m watching it, and there’s woman wrote this really crappy, nasty bio, unauthorized biography about me, and it’s just full of crap. And her name’s -- I forget her name. But anyway, she was nicer about me than my own half-sister, whose name is Nicole, who said things like, you know, "I would go visit" -- in this like -- really, like my mother’s got this voice like, "oh, really," it was like that therapist voice, like, "oh, I understand." I would visit Courtney at her institution she was in, and I would wonder what was so wrong with my big sister -- She never visited me there! She lived in New Zealand. They’re -- they’re just -- I think they’re just sociopathic nutbags, the most of them.

And then two of the brothers, Toby and Daniel, they’re pretty cool, they’re OK. And then one of the sisters, Jamie, she’s unfortunately got a really bad weight problem. She’s a lawyer, at least. Then there’s crazy Nicole and my mother, who are kind of the same person. Then we’ve got my father, who is psychotic. So I really don’t think that there’s a fascinating matrilineage at all.

BP: (laughter) Yes.

CL My grandmother is a famous novelist; well, you know that Paula is a famous novelist. I met her once. She didn’t take to me. I think one of the reasons that she didn’t take to me is because Paula is obsessed with getting her canon -- Jonathan Franzen wrote this piece in like ’99 about how Paula was a better writer than Updike and a better writer than Tom Wolfe, and blah, blah, blah, and Paula really wants her canon to be part of the criteria of -- at Brown or Yale or something. And there are two dirty, filthy secrets -- actually there’s three dirty, filthy secrets -- four dirty, filthy secrets Paula has. One, she makes her money off of her children’s books, which are great books, they’re Newbery Award winning, Caldecott Award winning books. Two, I’m her granddaughter. Three, who my grandfather really is. Four, that would be her second marriage, which was to the president of Polygram, and she walked out of that marriage with $20 million.

BP: And who is your grandfather? Who really is your grandfather? [Editor's Note: There has been some speculation that Marlon Brando is Love's biological grandfather.]

CL You know, I hired a private detective to get the DNA test, because I’m so sick of speculating about it, that I’ll tell you when those tests come back.

BP: Very interesting. And there’s a statement in your book beside one photo that says, “I am not here to make you feel better. I am just here to make you feel worse.” Is that a philosophy or a motto, and do you --

CL No, I think it’s just something I wrote. (laughter) No, of course that’s not a motto. Please. I’m not mean.

CL No! I think I make sobriety look cool. (laughter) I think I make a lot of things look cool, and I’m an early adopter, and I know how to make things look cool, and I know when things are over, and I know when things are starting, and -- for instance, with this Borat business, I’m editing Z magazine’s British comedy issue, and I was onto that British comedy thing two years ago. And I think I’m just -- I’m an early adopter, and I just did an interview with the London Times with Caitlin Moran, and she was kind of like almost screaming at me. (I’ve done five interviews with her over the years.) "Madonna’s an early adopter, you’re an early adopter, but she makes something out of it and you shoot yourself in the foot with it. Why?" And I’m like, because rock and roll doesn’t have -- is not a province of taking a trend and making it into something digestible instantly. Because I make rock and roll, and this is why I was so very, very excited that one of my favorite directors last month at dinner asked me to play the title role in a film, but I can’t say anything until --

BP: Oh, darn it! Now, come on, you’re leaving us –

CL I can’t. I mean, this is a 900-pound gorilla director. I -- literally, it would -- I’d screw myself if I said something. But the good news is, it really happened, it didn’t happen in my head. And it was just -- I thought I was just going to dinner with him, and he said, he unpacks -- reaches into his man-bag and puts the script across to me and I was like, whoa! This is great. You know, the downside of this is that he’s a notoriously slow director, but --

BP: Well, what about writing another book? Will you do that? You’ve got those two rooms, like you said, filled with more memorabilia.

CL Well, it’s not memorabilia. Most of it is kind of stuff that is private. Not that there’s not a lot of stuff -- I got asked in -- one interviewer, someone was like almost attacking me, like, you know, now you’ve opened yourself up completely. I’m like, well, kind of, and kind of not. I’ve given a lot of things that are really, really, really personal, I wouldn’t normally give unless I felt like, in a way, pushed up against a wall and like, oh my God, you know, I’m so frickin’ misunderstood.
And there’s two famous music critics. One is named David Frick and the other one’s named Robert Hilburn, the LA Times and from Rolling Stone. And years and years ago -- they both told me this story -- they’re on a plane together, and they’re sitting together, and they have this conversation about how I am a PhD in misunderstood, misunderstanding of a person’s persona and personality. And I said to both of them, as they both tell me this story over the years, well, why don’t you fix it? You’re going to have the conversation, why don’t you go write the story that fixes it? The famous -- when Mick Jagger got arrested and the, at that time, very conservative London Times wrote the “who breaks the butterfly upon the wheel” story that saved them from prison, why don’t you fix it? And they both kind of came up with weak excuses, and I just thought, you know what, I’ll fix it. I’m going to put something out that basically – it’s not a redefinition. That’s what the record will do. The record is a redefinition, and certainly doing this film. Films are great, because people believe you are who you play in films, and films are awesome --

BP: But this book is your version of yourself. This is a version that you’re putting –

CL Yes.

BP: So -- and when you put it together -- and I swear this is my last question, because I know you’ve got other interviews to go on to. What was the process like? Did it feel cathartic? Did it feel joyous? How did it feel to --

CL No, it didn’t. I can barely look at it -- it’s embarrassing, you know -- sign it, I don’t want to really read -- I don’t like looking at it. It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing stuff in there. It’s like, I gave a lot of myself away. And I don’t even -- like the girl that editred everything -- I don’t even look her in the eyes. (laughter) Like, I don’t -- I pay her her check, and we don’t even talk. Because she knows all my sh**t. And I’m like -- I saw her partying the other night, and I’m like hi, and the woman said hi. Didn’t even look her in the eye. Thanked her paid her, but she knows way too much.

BP: And everyone’s going to know a lot. 'Dirty Blonde, the Diaries of Courtney Love' is out from FSG, that excellent literary press -- well, it’s Faber & Faber, actually, right, Courtney?

CL Pardon me?

BP: It’s Faber & Faber, right, the book?

CL Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you so much for not being nearly as rude as my last interview -- he sat here and just, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, until I wanted to throw something at him.

BP: You know what, this is your story, and this is your time to talk about it. So thanks again, and take care.

CL Thank you so much.

Fucking scary. I literally just watched that E true hollywood story last night and today. Her sister was not hateful towards Courtney at all, and that bio writer seemed to know what she was talking about.

yeah...she didnt give it away...

__________________

BE COOL!
GET DRUNK!

Ugh was it on TV? I ALWAYS MISS IT

she didnt say her sister was hateufl
she was saying that she was lying

__________________

BE COOL!
GET DRUNK!

It's on youtube

...Louise Post?
that'd be cool

very.

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when that bitch breathes, the air comes out crooked.

uh, is there really a pic of her and LIZ????
um
post plz if you can.

She's SOOOOOOO disconnected with her family. I mean, it's always been obvious but she talks about her siblings like they're not even her family.

Now, that is just not true Vourtney. He slapped yor mom. I don't know about you, but I call that a proper face-to-face meeting.

her interviews always confuse me, i can never tell if she's telling the truth...