 Poppy
Z. Brite, better known for her punk-gothic horror and dreadful taste in clothing (the
jacket photo shows her looking like a reject from a 1985 audition for a Cure video) here
gets her hands on something much scarier than club-hopping vampires: the life of Courtney
Love. Born Love Michelle Harrison, Courtney's childhood combines the worst of doped-up
hippie parenting with her innate autism to produce a life that could only lead to
rock-and-roll stardom. Starting with her first acid trip at age 4, administered by her
father, a paragon of parental responsibility, Courtney went on to four name changes, two
years in juvenile detention, a trip to Japan courtesy of a white slave ring, living with
gloom rockers in Liverpool, and a melange of drugs and sexual experiments all prior to
leaving her teens. This makes for quite the page-turner--in a guilty sort of way and in
spite of Poppy Z.'s occasionally cutesy-teen prose: "Courtney Love has always been
surrounded by chaos, triumph, pain, and glamour." Still, in spite of the taboo of
reading celebrity bios, this one stands out because of the truly odd and, perhaps,
innovative life of its subject. Not simply a rock-and-roll musical bedrooms romp, Love's
life is far enough out of the mainstream, or even the alternate streams, to offer
challenges to many of the values we take for granted in living our lives. Things such as
safety, stability, and even hygiene are thrown out the window in a life that reads like
the outsider fiction of Hesse or Kerouac, only with more electric guitars. |