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. Sheís 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 Madonnaís 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 isódumb like a fox.

Dirty Blonde, a scrapbook of Loveís 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 Loveís drug use and her sex lifeólike her pubescent lesbian longings, her combustible marriage to Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Although she does admit to paparazzi-inspired make-out sessions with Charlieís 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 Loveís heart-rending introspection off-putting, smart and honest. Itís tough to trivialize her once sheís droned on in a teenage-girlís 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 Pretenderís Chrissie Hynde and REM, waxes poeticóat an early pre-college ageóabout modernist Charles Baudelaire, gay poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, and early art house filmmakers Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau. Indicative of a troubled girlís diaries, Love includes compulsive lists like the ìeverything I like and everything else is boringî list, which includes; Naziís, 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, ìI want to be the girl with the most cake,î 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. Sheís 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 1980ís punk-cynism. And her diaries reflect her subverted intellect and lust for academia.

Follow Loveís coming-to-terms with her ice-queen and absent mother, her reform school daysósans the uniformóher school-girl European travels and her rise to gawked-at fame. Flipping through Dirty Blonde, itís easy to hang up on her email to current celebrity train-wreck Lindsay Lohan and Lindsayís heart-felt response.

Toss Dirty Blonde off as druggieís fluff, and Loveís essence goes ignored. The diaries reveal a sensitive, proto-feminist, who unabashedly bleeds emotion all over the page. In response to husband Cobainís suicide, Love drags a crayon across the page revealing, ìI canít grow another heart.î Well, neither can your readers. Youíre an open wound festering and infectious. We canít look away and we want more.

>> Get the Book