Courtney Love: The Real Story [Hardcover]

Certainly a noble cause. And it's especially impressive that she'd attempt to write a nonbiased biography, being Courtney's friend. This is one of the reasons I think this book fails as an accurate and unbiased chronicle. You can't turn to the media for solid information on Courtney Love, because there are several different versions of every story about her. And you can't turn to Courtney Love for solid information on herself, because she's the one that gave the media all that misinformation. (This is a woman who's provided three conflicting accounts of her own NAME: over the years, she's variously claimed her birthname to be Courtney Michelle Harrison, Love Michelle Harrison, and Michelle Love Harrison.)

The publishers certainly must have sensed sensationalism. If they'd put an unflattering picture of Love on the cover of the book, it would utterly change the meaning of the phrase "The Real Story." But they chose to put a glowing, smiling, recent photo of her on the cover. For this reason, the book itself screams "shamelessly authorized biography" even before you open it up.

I have no idea how much of this material is true and how much is false. I'm not really a hardcore fan of Courtney Love, so I haven't read enough Courtneylore to know how many different versions of every single story there are. I am, however, a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan, so I personally can account for the misinformation about lead singer Billy Corgan in this book. For one thing, Brite states that Billy is one inch shorter than Courtney. That would make Courtney six and a half feet tall. This is undoubtedly one of the many "facts" Brite obtained directly from Courtney and placed in the book unquestioningly, without doing any backup research to see if she might be lying. (In almost any major article on the Smashing Pumpkins you can find, the journalist makes some comment - however fleeting - about Billy Corgan's surprising tallness.)

Courtney has often talked about how Billy comforted her after Kurt Cobain's death. For a few years after the fact, she even made it sound as if they'd had sex. Only recently did she admit that they didn't have sex, but said Billy did help her a lot in moving on with her life. In "The Real Story," he has no role in the comforting process at all. Being as how he's never said anything about it, Courtney is once again the only source of information - and Brite takes her current word for it without doing the background research and finding all the other, conflicting, things she's said on the subject.

Finally, Celebrity Skin. Probably anyone reading this review is familiar with the infamous Celebrity Skin wars, in which Billy and Courtney went back and forth in the media over how large of a role he had in making the album. In response to his assertation that he'd written six songs, Courtney said that he'd barely done any work at all. In "The Real Story," he calls her up, offering to help her on the album, and doesn't stop helping her until he's completely exhausted. At no point does Courtney ask him to leave. In various other versions of the story, SHE calls HIM up, asking him to help, and only lets him do some of the work, despite his willingness to do more.

There are most definitely more, but I don't know enough about Hole or Nirvana to point them out. It is, however, dubious that Kurt Cobain would have an "obsession" with guns. And then there's Hank Harrison, who's been given all the three-dimensional personality of a comic book supervillain. Like another reviewer mentioned, every man in Courtney's life is portrayed as having been bent on doing her in, while she's always well-meaning. This is the kind of problematic manuscript that results from trying to write a biography about a friend of yours - and assuming that your friend is always going to impart to you "the REAL story" about her life.

This book says more about Courtney Love than any factual biography could. Does she really see herself as the victim she's portrayed as in this book? If she didn't before, why did she suddenly change her perception of herself at the time of this book's publication - 1997? And why in God's name does she feel the need to lie about stupid, insignificant things like her birthname or Billy Corgan's height?

Whether or not she was in fact administered LSD at the age of 4 (or age 2, or 3, as she's claimed in various interviews), this account screams of a little girl whose painful childhood prompted her to escape into her own dreamworld - and whose talkative nature invited countless music journalists into that world.