Heart-Shaped Box

COURTNEY LOVE: “In preparation for the school play, I studied the part of Snow White forever and had it down. And they gave me, without even auditioning me, the part of the Evil Witch. And that’s when I was eight.”

MELISSA ROSSI: “She was not the classic American beauty, this tall, dumpling-bodied yapper, who even then, before it was fashionable, liked to dress in ripped vintage clothes. But Courtney was smart, and she had perfected the compensatory skills required by less-than-pretty girls to get along in the world. Because if you’re less than lovely, if you’re only ‘pretty on the inside,’ there are but two choices: sit back and take whatever comes along, or aim high and devise a bag of attention-getting tricks.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “Courtney, Ursula Wehr and Robin Barbur decided to start a band, Sugar Babylon, whose practice sessions mostly consisted of drinking coffee at Denny’s and talking about the mansions, clothes, and private jets they were going to have when they reached the top of the charts. They dyed their hair blue-black and teased it high, wore smudged jet-black eyeliner and blood-red lipstick, draped themselves in diaphanous thrift-store finery and far too many bracelets.”

URSULA WEHR: “It was more like we were MAYBE GOING TO BE a band. We’d get together and drink a lot of wine.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “Imagine that it’s 1983, 82 81 and 80, you’re a teenage piece of white trash and not even remotely decorative, but you love the great rock dream and it’s all you’ve got… And you buy a guitar and it burns like a coal in your hand and you feel some power and for once it isn’t the power of being made fun of or picked on, it’s the shallow mystic power of self-respect, the power to change the fucking world the way it is to you, the power to culturally uplift, in short, the power to save the world.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “Things I love in Liverpool: Star Trek, A.A. Milne, Oregon beaches, cherry blossoms, Halloween, Baudelaire, and ‘The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.’ Things I hate in Liverpool: Pete Burns, Jim Morrison, Quaaludes with lager, Desmond Morris, John Donne, Gurdjieff, black pudding, and the William S. Burroughs method of writing lyrics.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “Courtney made arrangements to return to San Francisco, taking Kat Bjelland with her in order to finally start a band. They moved into a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment and decorated it with the torn lace, dried roses, candles, and antique baby dolls they both adored. When Courtney called her, Jennifer Finch was thrilled to join her friend on Fillmore Street. They did drugs, went to shows, argued the merits of Sylvia Plath versus Anne Sexton, found joy in Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours,’ wore out copies of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s,’ and window-shopped for guitars.”

JENNIFER FINCH: "She was a brassy, loud-mouth know-it-all and I loved her. She was like no other girl I'd ever met."

POPPY Z. BRITE: "Kat Bjelland's mother had left the family when she was five, and Kat was raised by a mostly absent father. Though she spent her teenage years on the cheerleading squad and the basketball team instead of in juvenile halls and strip clubs, she would come home after school and 'sit in this big overstuffed chair and listen to Billie Holiday, read Sylvia Plath, drink Kahlua from my dad's liquor cabinet, and fantasize how I was going to get the fuck out of there.'"

KAT BJELLAND: "When I met Courtney she was really cool and energetic and vibrant and we were really close from then on. It was like finding a soul mate, a sister-type person."

POPPY Z. BRITE: "Kat tended to play the part of the cute bratty girl, making big innocent eye and uttering drop-dead cynical gems in a teeny little voice. It was an image she would later hone and cultivate professionally, which would lead to conflict with Courtney. But in 1985 they hit it off."

LORI BARBERO: “Kat was a demon. A demon with a demon. I don’t know how many times we had to go to the consulate to get a new passport for Kat. I had to keep an eye on her cause she liked to get kinda screwed up at night and she’d do this thing where she’d shriek at the top of her voice and smash a glass so she could get attention. Between her and Courtney, it was kinda like, Who can get the most attention all the time? They were both exotic dancers. I don’t know where the hell ‘exotic’ comes from, but you know, they both had a need for attention.”

COURTNEY LOVE: "We [Sugar Baby Doll] were going to make the most obnoxious music in the world. However, I had a doctor who gave me a hundred sedatives a week. So we ended up make this sort of faux Cocteau Twins music."

COURTNEY LOVE: “Years ago, in a certain town, my reputation had gotten so bad that every time I went to a party, I was expected to burn the place down and knock out every window."

MELISSA ROSSI: “Courtney and Kat moved back to San Francisco. Courtney’s former flame, Rozz Rezabek, had moved back to Portland but had kept his San Francisco apartment; Courtney moved in for a while, convincing the building manager that she was Rozz’s fiancee. She also went to Rozz’s psychiatrist, paying $200 an hour. At Rozz’s next visit, the psychiatrist mentioned a fascinating young woman who claimed to be Rozz’s fiancee and talked of nothing but him. Of course it was Courtney. Rozz was ultimately notified that she was ‘subletting’ his apartment, and he okayed the arrangement. Courtney decorated the place with lace, knickknacks, miniature tea sets, baby rattles, and old vases that she filled with violets. She dug through stacks of Rozz’s notebooks, his journals, and the piles of love letters from his former fans – grading them all, and writing comments in his diaries. She was terribly upset, however, when she came across the love letters she had written to Rozz; many of them were unopened.”

MELISSA ROSSI: “Courtney could create an atmosphere of jet-setting debauchery, the twentieth-century equivalent of an ancient Roman feast, this one serving tea, brandy, and blues. They lay around saying lines out of their own personal romance novel. ‘Who has the prettiest eyes?’ Rozz would murmur, referring to hers. ‘The ocean,’ she’d reply. Whenever Rozz awoke from a short nap, he found the bed littered with books and notebooks filled with scrawled lyrics and ideas for movies, and Courtney would be working the phone, calling bands and producers in England or Asia. She could simply wear a guy down and induce creative mania: she never shut up and she never got boring, even after seventy-two hours of straight talking.”

COURTNEY LOVE: [To Rozz Rezabek] “You may be blessed with charm, but I’m blessed with the emotions of a four-year-old.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “The two times I went to Seattle previous to being successful as a musician were really frightening. The first time there was a guy named Vinny up on Capitol Hill with a huge abscess in his leg, and then when I came down from Alaska, after I went up there to gather my thoughts, because I was 24 and if I hadn’t succeeded by the time I was 25 I was pretty much gonna jump off a roof. I spent three fuckin’ months in Alaska in the dark, in a trailer writing lyrics and working a fuckin’ six hour shift at PJ’s, a strip club that fishermen go to. I got off the bus in Seattle and saw a U-Men poster and a Mudhoney poster, and I got one block from the Greyhoud station and went, ‘No way. They will throw me out of town or I will die.’ So I got back on that bus. Why? Just instinct, man. Just instinct. I felt like it was a dangerous place. It’s got death in it. What I know about Seattle is dark, dark drug stuff, dark, dark money stuff. Fuckin’ lumber, fuckin’ corruption, fuckin’ heroin, fuckin’ scary!”

COURTNEY LOVE: “I decided to move to Alaska because I needed to get my shit together and learn how to work. So I went on this sort of vision quest… I got rid of all my earthly possessions. I had my bad little strip clothes and some big sweaters, and I moved into a trailer with two other strippers.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “She had arrived during the season of twenty-four hour darkness, and she often saw the fantastic colors of the aurora borealis flickering across the sky. She remained blissfully unaware of a serial killer in the area dismembering numerous female victims, some of whom were strippers. Despite the onus of the job, which turned out not to be as lucrative as she’d hoped, Alaska was a peaceful interlude in her life. For three months she worked, wrote, and spoke to almost no one.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “The clock was ticking and I was just like, Jesus Christ, I’ve got to kick some ass, you know, and I don’t want to be twenty-five and not have a band. I’d been trying to have a band since I was sixteen, and I still wasn’t successful… I’d been kicked out of Sugar Baby Doll, the most retarded band in history, I’d been kicked out of Faith No More, I’d been kicked out of Jennifer Finch’s band, I’d been kicked out of a million and one bands.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “Courtney’s original intention was to call the band Sweet Baby Crystal Powered By God. Once she got over that, the name Hole came from two sources. The first was a conversation Courtney had with her mother in which Linda told her she couldn’t carry a hole around inside her just because she’d suffered a problematic childhood (The hell I can’t! Courtney thought). The second was a line from Euripides’ tragedy ‘Medea’ in which the title character speaks of a hole pierced through her soul. The word’s sexual connotations were never the main idea, but they didn’t bother Courtney either.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “I had little visions of Kurt Cobain and Mark Arm in my head. Not in a sexual way, but… because every town has its sort of rock-star icon guy, the king of the town. And in my head I was like, ‘Yeah, when I get my band together, you’re going to open for me.’ Which is a great way of taking that energy, the sexual energy that comes from rock, and changing it.”

MELISSA ROSSI: “Former bandmates Kat Bjelland and Courtney both shared a love of vintage clothes. Antique garb wasn’t hard to find in Portland; back then, those who liked old stuff didn’t have to toss out much money to buy it. Portland was a Dumpster-dive kind of town, a place where every weekend the porches and garages were filled with old clothes and junk. Those bins spawned many an odd fashion: dust coats and old-lady dresses, frocks and frills, Girlie girl, the look forbidden in the genderless household Courtney grew up in, soon became her fashion statement. But the baby-doll origins of the ‘Kinderwhore’ look, with its many bows and frills, was locally credited to the artist Ava Lake – although Kat and Courtney would later fight about which of them started it.”

NEAL KARLEN: “Kinderwhore fashion was personified by the babydoll dress, clothes that would look very Lolita-ish on a 25 year-old woman. Kat Bjelland took that fashion on as this sort of symbol of her music and who she was. And it became a big deal when Courtney became so big and claimed this look as her own. She ripped off Kat’s act. I think the word frenemy was invented for those two.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “Me and Kat (Bjelland) were best friends for almost ten years and if we’d had been different sexes, I’d bet we’d have got married. Instead, we just fight over who’s going to be a star."

COURTNEY LOVE: “[Kinderwhore] is a good look. It’s sexy, but you can still sit down and say ‘I read Camille Paglia’.”

COURTNEY LOVE: [Accoutrements of the kinderwhore look] “Used to use Rembrandt toothpaste until I found out they sponsor the Rush Limbaugh show. I like tooth powder. Xtra pair undies (high waisted white cotton from Woolworth’s), Carmex, 3-4 baby barrettes, Great Lash Mascara & YSL Moss Mascara, 2 clean Max Factor powder puffs, Xtra vintage white slip, Bobbi Brown taupe eyeshadow, Christian Dior Holiday Red pencil, Wet’n’Wild Shiny Frosty Pink, my fourth pair of Marilyn rhinestone shades from Patricia Fields ($98 and I keep breaking them).”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “In her journal, Courtney wrote notes to a hypothetical child that read more like notes to herself – though she did record that her first daughter would probably be named Frances (other possibilities included Claire, Willow, and Violet). Among her bits of advice were, ‘Opiates and cocaine don’t let you get anything done – they’re liars;’ ‘Alcohol and cigarettes are weaknesses, disgusting ones; don’t have weak flesh;’ and ‘Reading is a really good thing – it’s a departure from squalor.’”

MELISSA ROSSI: “Courtney was showing the fruits of having been a human sponge for more than a decade. From Echo and the Bunnymen’s lead singer Ian McCulloch, from whom she admitted snatching rock-star poses, to Rozz Rezabek, she’d been studying the people whose lives she paraded through, gleaning insight into power moves and personalities. She borrowed jokes, she borrowed styles, she borrowed clothes, and she borrowed boyfriends. Courtney was a flashy compilation piece, the walking best of Portland, Liverpool, Minneapolis, San Francisco, L.A., and New York, all mixed up with a little of Edie Sedgwick, Blanche DuBois, Lydia Lunch, and the O’Haras – both Scarlett and Neely. She was an attention-getting production all right, for Courtney always did have a taste for the outrageous, and an ability to pull her personality parts together with a bright, funny charm that could darken in a second.”

COURTNEY LOVE: "I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be famous. All I could see was: one day I will be famous, and then everything will be fair."

EVERETT TRUE: “Tonight in Hollywood, amid films of strippers and tales of anguish and exhilaration I witness the best… no, scratch that. Tonight I witness the only rock’n’roll band in the world. Something to do with equal amounts energy, luck, pain, passion, anger, and the three major chords, I reckon.”

COURTNEY LOVE: "Maybe I'm deeply wounded... maybe that's why screaming feels so fucking good."

EVERETT TRUE: "Hole mangle a tune with passion. During 'Dicknail' Courtney touches her breasts, parts of her thighs, breathes hard and arches her back right over. A real suicide blonde if ever there was one. Hole are dangerous and inevitable. They are happening like war happens and nobody, not even they, can understand how powerful they are."

ROSEMARY CARROLL: “The first time I saw her onstage she was dressed like a soiled debutante; Her dress was ripped and she was a mess, except for a perfectly dressed huge pink bow on the back of her dress. She was riveting to watch. Courtney had a presence and a power that was fascinating.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “In any scene I’ve been in, whether it’s Minneapolis or Liverpool or Seattle or Portland or LA or New York, I’ve always been the fucking most ambitious one in some weird way. And I’ve always been the one that didn’t really fit in with what everyone else was doing, and I’m pretty proud of that.”

MELISSA ROSSI: “Courtney’s mouth was her most powerful weapon, as unceasing in its noise as a power tool on a summer day… In any conversation, no matter with whom, no matter the hour, she could spin a verbal cyclone in tones sultry or shrill, a dizzying whirlwind of ideas, gossip, and confessions punctuated by the names of musicians, authors, and heady books.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “They all say I’m a fucking whirl, a big mess that Keats would have died for. I was born intolerant. Full of ghosts that intervene. With a weird star. A weird, twisted, intense, lucky fatal star that’s wrapped around me like my search for perfect dependence. Blue with choking on this umbilical. Ah, she said. I’m alone.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: "During that summer, Courtney made a list of the different drugs she had taken during her life. The list began with the LSD she had been given at the age of four and included all the major narcotic groups and several basic stimulants as well as red meat, squatting, ugly boys, and a mixture of baby laxative, Folger's coffee, chocolate pudding, and dirt."

ROBIN BARBUR: "She'd steal your shit, she'd expect you to steal her shit. She'd have no concept of money. We took all the money from her trust fund at the first of the month and bought a dress and a camera and a bottle of Grand Marnier, and then we would starve."

RODDY BOTTOM: "She got money from her trust fund every month, and then she would just go out and blow it in a huge way. She'd buy ridiculously expensive perfumes and candles and flowers... and drugs."

COURTNEY LOVE: “The first time I tried smack I was about 16, I guess. It was a horrific experience. At the time, I was working at a dance hall in Taiwan, trying to earn money so I could afford an apartment in San Francisco. I was utterly broke, so I was sleeping in a bed with a bunch of Brazilian dancers. I had to get up every night to dance to Gloria Gaynor and Billy Idol. After a while, I was like, ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’ All the other dancers were constantly nodding out. But I had no money, and they were holding my passport, so I was kind of stuck. So, one day I went to this doctor’s office and he had packets of Seconal lying around. I started stealing from him. Soon after, some guy turned me on to heroin, which happened by accident. I was hanging out with some guy, and he offered me a few lines, and I did it because I thought it was coke. The next thing I remember is waking up on a plane to San Francisco wearing a fur coat and a Chinese wedding dress, with $10,000 in my pocket. That was my first real heroin experience.”

 

 

DAVE MARKEY: “After Reading, in Rotterdam, Courtney came backstage and brought Billy Corgan to meet everybody. I specifically remember Sonic Youth and Nirvana and me in this sort of classroom that was doubling as a backstage room. The Smashing Pumpkins were getting huge at the time, and in walks Courtney with Billy Corgan, arm in arm. I remember they left the room, and everyone was cracking jokes at Billy Corgan’s expense, like, ‘Oh, yeah, we met the rock star.’ Cobain went up to the wall and wrote in Magic Marker, COURTNEY + GISH, ‘Gish’ being the Smashing Pumpkins album at the time. I think that was pretty telling of where people’s attitudes were at that time. Everyone was making fun of the fact that Billy Corgan was already known as this sort of alternative-rock star. That is right before Nirvana would become the real rock stars that we were parodying in the film.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “I didn’t dump Billy to go out with Kurt. If anything, later on Billy dumped me because I had something with Trent Reznor, and that was past grunge. Dating Billy was rough. He loves me. I guess I love him, too. He’s a good guy. He saved my life a few times. You can’t ever forget that. We had this very romantic relationship, almost like girlfriends. We wrote letters to each other. We were like girlfriends. Girlfriends that loved each other very much.”

MELISSA ROSSI: “During all the years when Courtney had felt alone and deserted by her family, hating almost everyone, and plotting to get revenge by becoming a star, there was someone else who shared the same sentiment. He knew all about feeling worthless and neglected. He knew the lure of the stage, how stepping upon it could temporarily negate the deep wells of self-loathing. While Courtney was dancing up and down the West Coast, he had been sleeping under bridges in the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, or in the music section of the locked-up library. While she was getting beaten up emotionally, being told she wasn’t pretty or desirable enough, he was getting beaten up by the locals in Aberdeen, who thought he was effeminate and weird… A spark passed between them the moment they met; the sky should have opened and issued a loud warning.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “Courtney had been collecting heart-shaped boxes for years. She selected a Victorian one of silk and lace, spritzed the interior with her perfume, and packed it full of tiny exquisite things: a handful of seashells and baby pinecones, dried tea roses, a doll, a set of miniature teacups. She raised it to her face, breathed deeply of its fragrance, exhaled into it as if her breath could carry a voodoo spell. Then she fitted the lid on carefully, tied it with a ribbon, and entrusted it to Dave Grohl’s care. Kurt never responded. But Courtney never gave up.”

KURT COBAIN: “I thought she looked liked Nancy Spungen. She looked like a classic punk rock chick.”

CHARLES R. CROSS: “She switched from subject to subject the way someone might flick the channels of a television remote control. When Kurt described their first conversation to his friend Ian Dickson, he began by declaring, ‘I’ve met the coolest girl in the world.’”

CHARLES R. CROSS: “After getting high they went out walking and came upon a dead bird. Kurt pulled three feathers off the animal and passed one to Courtney, holding the two others in his hand. ‘This is for you, this is for me,’ he said. And then holding the third feather in his hand he added, ‘and this is for our baby we’re gonna have.’ She laughed and later remembered this as the point when she first fell in love with him.”

NICK KENT: “I recall reading a Kurt Cobain interview once when he claimed he and Courtney Love had enjoyed ‘great sex’ whilst listening to Captain Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica.’ I knew then that their relationship was doomed.”

ANON: “You know those experiments where two elements react to each other? Kurt and Courtney reacted in the way petrol relates to a naked flame.”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “Love’s introduction to Nirvana greatly contributed to Cobain’s self-projection as aloof, different and more impulsive than his colleagues. ‘They’re all so fucking boring,’ he told Michael Azerrad. ‘There’s no one willing to take risks, like “Let’s just take off.” It’s always such a strict regimen – “Let’s get to the show, let’s play, let’s eat dinner and go to sleep.” I just got tired of it.’”

KURT COBAIN: “I just wanted to add some kind of excitement to my life, and I’d never met anyone so outspoken and charismatic. It just seems like she’s a magnet for exciting things to happen. Like if I walk down the street with her, someone might attack us with a knife or something just because she seems like that type of a person. I felt like a rebel, in a way, going off with Courtney… it was just so great to play this role with someone who would just suddenly stand up and smash a glass on the table and scream at me and throw me down.”

JENNIFER FINCH: “They’re both such heated freakin’ people, I can’t even believe they could be in the same room together. Yes, Kurt was heated. They had times when they were very loving and very sweet together and times where there was just a lot of someone not getting their way and the other person being kind of nasty. It wasn’t always Courtney being nasty, like some people might think.”

EVERETT TRUE: “Courtney, how should we say, had a talent for being slightly liberal with the truth. That was one of the things I loved about her, and so did Kurt. Kurt had a talent for being liberal with the truth, too. All of us did.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “The only thing I had was cool hair and better lyrics than anybody else and a really bad reputation. The only thing he had was genius and he was beautiful. And he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell.”

KURT COBAIN: “We just happen to piss off all different kinds of people; especially Courtney does. She’s a totally threatening woman. She’s totally smart and she’s threatening. She speaks her mind, she tells too much of the truth. Even liberals don’t like smart women.”

KURT COBAIN: “Courtney, when I say, ‘I love you,’ I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever, ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc., me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head. I parade you around proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral.”

CHARLES CROSS: “Marriage seemed initially to mellow both Kurt and Courtney. When they were away from the spotlight, and away from drugs, their relationship had many moments of tenderness. Stripped of their fame, they both turned back into the scared lost children they’d been prior to being discovered. Each night before bed they would pray together. Once in bed, they would read each other books. Kurt said he loved to go to sleep listening to the sound of Courtney’s voice – it was a comfort he had missed for much of his life.”

KURT COBAIN: “I don’t think Courtney and I are fucked-up. We have lacked love all our lives, and we need it so much that if there’s any goal that we have, it’s to give Frances as much love as we can. That’s the one thing that I know is not going to turn out bad.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “We knew we could give Frances what we didn’t get: loyalty and compassion, encouragement. We knew we could give her a real home and spoil her rotten.”

KURT COBAIN: “The first thing Frances did with her hands on the sonogram was make the heavy metal Satan sign. The pediatrician looked at the monitor and said ‘Look at that gesture she’s making with her hands there.’ Courtney and I looked over and said, ‘That’s the sign of the Devil, doctor.’”

CHARLES CROSS: “With gables and gray shingles, the Cobain house looked better suited to the coast of Maine. Each family member found a small corner of the house to call their own: The north yard became Frances’ playground, complete with a jungle-gym; Courtney’s collection of teacups went on display in the kitchen, while her assortment of lingerie filled an entire closet in the bedroom; and the basement became the depository for all of Kurt’s gold record awards – they weren’t exhibited, just stacked. In an alcove on the main floor, a fully dressed mannequin stood, like some strange corpse-like sentinel. Kurt didn’t like large spaces, and his favorite part of the house was the closet off the master bedroom, where he would play guitar.”

PATTY SCHEMEL: “We lived together for a bit, me and Kurt and Courtney, when I first moved to Los Angeles. They had this really great place, but Kurt would just sit in the closet with his guitar and amp in the dark and play. He liked it in there. And the closet backed up against the room that I stayed in, so I could hear it all. That’s where I heard all the ‘In Utero’ stuff. The beginnings of ‘Rape Me’ I heard in there.”

CHARLES CROSS: “As is common in the marriage of two artists, they began to think alike, share ideas, and use each other as editor. They also shared a journal: Kurt would write a single line, to which Courtney would add a couplet. He read her writings, and she read his, and each was influenced by the other’s musings. Courtney was a more traditional lyricist, crafting tighter and less murky lines. Theirs was a relationship where each urged the other to push boundaries, and the artistic risk of these new songs was a matter of pride to her as well as to him.”

COURTNEY LOVE: "In one version of ‘Teen Spirit,’ Kurt sang the line, ‘Who will be the king and queen of the outcasted teens?’ Glamour aside, there could be no more perfect couple at the time, we were so right for each other because we were the most antisocial people in our entire area. It was great – and it was horrible because of all the drugs and the pain and the fear.”

DAVE GROHL: “I remember walking into their hotel room in New York and, for the first time, really realizing that these two are fucked up. They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was disgusting and gross.”

JENNIFER FINCH: “With Kurt and Courtney, it was like they were two characters in a play, and they’d simply switch parts. When one would get sober and better, the other would slip. But Courtney could control herself more than Kurt. With him, it was this train wreck that was going down and everyone knew it, and everyone just wanted to get out of the way.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: “Courtney made lists of things she wanted for her and Kurt’s Victorian house in Seattle. The swans, peacocks, potbellied pigs, and trellis of pink tea roses remained dreams, but they got the wisteria, the turtles, the water lilies, the greenhouse for growing orchids, and eventually the Remington twenty-gauge shotgun.”

POPPY Z. BRITE: "She climbed the stairs to the greenhouse, probably with more fear than Kurt had, and stood in the doorway. The blood was an enormous Rorschach blot in which she could see all the loneliness ahead of her in the world, and all that Kurt had felt that she hadn't been able to get through. She knelt and put her hands in it. Then she stretched out in Kurt's blood, seeing what he had not seen, the creeping in of night and the chill blue of dawn, the rain specking the skylights, the callous sun. Sometimes she slept, sometimes she sang. And always, always, she searched for him and could not feel him."

JENNIFER FINCH: “There was a moment at Kurt’s funeral when Courtney was giving her eulogy and Frances was just like, ‘Mommy, where are you?’ It was so sad.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “Imagine this: you’re peaking. You’re in your youth. At the prime of your life. The last thing you want to be is a symbol for heroin use. You’ve finally met someone of the opposite sex you can finally write with. That’s never happened in your life. The only other person you could ever write with wasn’t as good a writer as you, and this person’s a better writer than you. And you’re in love, you have a best friend, you have a soul-fucking-mate, and you can’t even believe it’s happening in your lifetime. And as a bonus he’s beautiful. And he’s the best fuck that ever walked. And he wants to have babies, and what you want is babies. You’ve wanted to have babies forever. And he understands everything you say. And he completes your sentences. And he’s lazy, but he is spiritual, and he’s not embarrassed about praying, and he’s not embarrassed about chanting, he’s not embarrassed about God, Jesus, none of it. He fucking thinks it’s really cool. He wants to fucking learn the path. He wants to be enlightened. Everything. And there’s even room for you to fix him, which you like, cause you’re a fixer. He’s perfect in almost every fucking way. The only fucking happiness I ever had. And then it all gets taken away…”

ROLLING STONE: "Kurt's tragedy was his inability to feel his own power; Love's achievement is to be able, across the black expanse of her sorrow, to maintain a sense of her own."

COURTNEY LOVE: “I am born first of purity, and secondly and most important of desperation.”

CRAIG MONTGOMERY: “The Courtney Love hotel room was a particular kind of disaster. She brings like two or three giant suitcases full of clothes, and somehow all those suitcases would get opened and everything would get spread out all over the hotel room. And then it’s all coated in cosmetics and baby powder, it’s just a tornado of clothes and makeup. She just sits in there and orders room service, but she doesn’t let the maids in to clean up or take out the dishes. It looks like an episode of ‘Hoarders.’”

PATTY SCHEMEL: “Courtney has a reputation of not being a nice person. It depends on the situation, though. She’s completely self-absorbed. And all that anger that she has is just one big cover-up, because, really, she’s just kind of a scared person.”

MARC SPITZ: “Courtney was whip-smart and could put a mutual friend or public figure into a perfect box. ‘She’s so Betsey Johnson.  He’s so Kim’s Video.’  I appreciated the dichotomy in her personality – the too-smart and sensitive indie kid and the flaming, hack-riffing, firebrand and shit-magnet.  Sometimes the former would recommend albums to me like Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Porcupine,’ which I had, or The Zombies’ ‘Odessey and Oracle,’ which I didn’t, and which became one of my all-time favorites (‘Get that Zombies record or perish!’)…  She was like a Bennington art school girl who referred to herself unironically and accurately as a ‘millionaire cultural icon.’”

RACHEL SHUKERT: “It took a special kind of guts to be a fuckup as a woman, I thought. To say to hell with being the nice girl, the responsible one, the one who makes sure the man takes care of himself and eats properly and doesn’t take too many drugs. To be just as nihilistic and self-destructive as a man, knowing all along that you’ll get crucified for it, because somehow, the world will make everything your fault. He’ll be a martyr, and you’ll be a succubus. He’ll be a genius and you’ll be a groupie, He’ll be a hero, and you’ll be an ugly fat crack whore who deserves to die.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “You’ve got to be prepared for the names they are going to call you compared to your male peers…You will be a floozy and a slattern. He will be virile and a ladies’ man. You will be a freakshow, a retching wretch, a sloppy drunk. He will be charismatic, vainglorious, a ferocious drunk and Dionysian. You will be indiscriminate and desperate. He will be generous, tortured and driven.”

ERIC ERLANDSON: “In our Western society, Courtney’s known and she’s an archetype – it’s like she’s this destroyer woman, kind of like a Medusa type. People tend to not like that type of woman, not realizing that we all have that inside us, and the more you hate it on the outside, the more you activate it inside. Deep down inside, she’s just a person with a soul, with her own karma, with her own life and her own experiences, and we don’t understand what that is and where she came from.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “I borrowed Scarlett O’Hara’s soul, and put it in a fat woman’s body and added poetry.”

CELIA GRECH: "Courtney was vividly nonconventional. She was hyped up on energy and self-confidence, and quite theatrical, a show-off. She had a sense of herself as a special person, something she made no effort to conceal. There were two possible reactions to Courtney - either you noticed her and loved her, or noticed her and loathed her. Unlike Kurt, she wasn't crushed by bad notices."

COURTNEY LOVE: "I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, can mean poetic sensibility, it can mean empathy, it can mean a hedonism and a libertarianism and a lack of judgment."

MELISSA ROSSI: "Always larger than life, Courtney was transformed onstage into a mystical presence, channeling both demons and angels, as she dropped to her knees, felt herself up, opened her mouth so wide she could have been giving head to the mike, and loosed a voice filled with seduction and rage, which suddenly softened to that of a scared child only to rise again to a from-the-gut bellowing."

LINDA HARRISON: “I think that Courtney came with a tremendous sense of pain in her. She’s not any different than she was when she was two years old… yet there were times, even as a small child, she would be really, deeply touched by something. And when that would happen, it was as though every part of her went soft for a little while – including her heart.”

KAT BJELLAND: “She’s both a heroine and a villain, because we’ve been through so much shit with each other but we still remain friends. She’s been very good to me and she’s been very bad to me, in roughly equal amounts. The thing about Courtney is she’s really upfront and honest with people and doesn’t hide her feelings about people or things that annoy her, which can be very hurtful sometimes. But a lot of it’s bullshit, and she’s a very challenging personality naturally, and very individual, which I admire greatly. She keeps life interesting. People think we hate each other just ‘cos of all the press bullshit. But I like her and admire her a lot.”

COURTNEY LOVE: "Shortly after the death of my husband I became obsessed with angels and ballerinas, things of grace and beauty, otherwordly. I used all my ninth-grade ballet classes to do bad en pointe photos. I kept crying every fifteen minutes, so I was a makeup nightmare. I wanted to be the swan in 'Swan Lake' and flutter, crumple, and disappear."

COURTNEY LOVE: “I have this real obsession with grace. That’s the No. 1 thing I look for in a person in the physiological realm. But part of grace is not speaking - like the silent ballerina. I’ve wondered, after everything that’s happened, “You can change your persona. You can be the silent widow.” But I cannot kill the thing inside of me. That has to be kept alive. Or I will die.”

COURTNEY LOVE: “I wanted the prize… And I might get the prize and if I don’t get the prize I’ll be kinda sad, but I’ll have gone down as being some place in evolution that is a reference point, to whoever does get the prize. The prize being: the crown passed from man to man to man in rock and roll, and the prize is, to get that crown and everything that goes with it as a woman, on a woman’s terms.”

SARAH VOWELL: “I mean, something’s gotta be popular, someone’s gotta be on television, isn’t it better that she’s Courtney Love than some completely vapid, talentless bimbo who’s never had a thought or written a song, who has nothing to say, nothing to question, nothing to ask?”

DENNIS COOPER: “Maybe she was just working me by talking a lot about literature and philosophy because those were things I was interested in. I had this impression of her as being a well-read, intellectual person, and she just doesn’t use that kind of image anymore. Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened.”

MELISSA ROSSI: "And that's the dance of Love, flipping from Courtney the destroyer who leaves burned-up buildings and frazzled minds in her trail, to Courtney the creator who can fill notebooks with lyrics and movie ideas overnight; from Courtney the contemptible to Courtney the absolutely amazing. She's the picture of resilience; even when she plunges over the edge, she quickly reemerges seeming only slightly dazed by the fall."

COURTNEY LOVE: “I’d like to have a really large brood of children and a good garden, and I’d like to grow really great hybrid roses and have a lot of dogs and a lot of cats and get ‘Victoria’ magazine and have a goddamn nice house! I don’t think I want to be sitting on a porch drinking whiskey and singing the blues. Knowing me, I’ll probably end up at a bar, asking some guy to get me a martini. Still bleaching my hair at fifty-nine.”