Courtney Love

Dirty Blonde is a voyeuristic journey into the habitrail mind of a drug-addled celebrity, obsessed with her own fame and that of others. She’s an artist, hard-assed musician, anglophile, punk-rock aficionado, cinephile, wife and mother. Like most celebrities graced with unchained artistic vision wrapped in a layer of self-hatred and awareness of their own expiration date, Love had become a caricature of herself. The celebrity joke famous for public drunken or drug-infused meltdowns, who once tossed her compact on to a platform to catch Madonna’s attention at the MTV Video Music Awards, only to allow Queen Madge to make an ass out of her, proves with her diaries that she is—dumb like a fox.

Dirty Blonde, a scrapbook of Love’s napkin-scrawled thoughts pasted together with memorabilia that includes food stamps and documents from the Children and Legal Services Department, lacks juicy perverted details of Love’s drug use and her sex life—like her pubescent lesbian longings, her combustible marriage to Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Although she does admit to paparazzi-inspired make-out sessions with Charlie’s Angels star and professed bi-sexual Drew Barrymore, and to a penchant for S&M, she steers clear of lascivious details and focuses on the psychological.

A gawker, a celebrity D-list watcher, a tabloid gunner, and a dirt-seeker will find Love’s heart-rending introspection off-putting, smart and honest. It’s tough to trivialize her once she’s droned on in a teenage-girl’s handwriting about her ugliness, fat and outcast status. The Love diaries reveal her unfulfilled longing to study at Oxford, and to become the object of love. No tawdry sex and drug tales here.

At first glance, the diaries come off like a trashy coffee-table book: a conversation piece. But the woman who idolizes punk-rock goddess Patti Smith and later, The Pretender’s Chrissie Hynde and REM, waxes poetic—at an early pre-college age—about modernist Charles Baudelaire, gay poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, and early art house filmmakers Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau. Indicative of a troubled girl’s diaries, Love includes compulsive lists like the “everything I like and everything else is boring” list, which includes; Nazi’s, the history of Babylon, Post-modern celebrities, being a good spanker and a good spankee.

The blonde-ruby-red-lipped front woman of Hole, who sang, “I want to be the girl with the most cake,” includes in her visceral scrapbook, a rejection letter from the New Mickey Mouse Club and progress reports from juvie hall. If nothing, Love knows who she is. Her desire to become and to eviscerate post-modern celebrities is particularly telling. She’s nothing if not a bricolage of art modes, styles and genres haphazardly slapped together and labeled as anti-art, and she knows it. Love, a singer, actress and a tabloid-baby is the poster-child for post-modern, having come to age during 1980’s punk-cynism. And her diaries reflect her subverted intellect and lust for academia.

Follow Love’s coming-to-terms with her ice-queen and absent mother, her reform school days—sans the uniform—her school-girl European travels and her rise to gawked-at fame. Flipping through Dirty Blonde, it’s easy to hang up on her email to current celebrity train-wreck Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay’s heart-felt response.

Toss Dirty Blonde off as druggie’s fluff, and Love’s essence goes ignored. The diaries reveal a sensitive, proto-feminist, who unabashedly bleeds emotion all over the page. In response to husband Cobain’s suicide, Love drags a crayon across the page revealing, “I can’t grow another heart.” Well, neither can your readers. You’re an open wound festering and infectious. We can’t look away and we want more.

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