Courtney Love - Dirty Blonde, Book Review

I'll be the first to admit it: I've never been a huge fan of Courtney Love. Sure, I will dance around to 'Violet' whenever I hear it at Trash, I followed the endless media hype around the time of her biggest breakdown back in '02/'03, but I never really got into her, if you know what I mean. That's not to say I don't appreciate and applaud her for her newly sober and macrobiotic (and Buddhist!) ways. When Dirty Blonde, otherwise known as Courtney Love's book of 'diaries' (there's much much more in the book than that) arrived in my mailbox, I was very eager to see/read what it was all about.

While it'd be a near impossible task to read every entry and diatribe throughout Dirty Blonde's 300 pages, I managed to read and skim a good bulk of the text. I was pleasantly surprised. The works begin with Courtney as a child around 6 years old and continue all the way to present day, excluding her '4 drug years' because she produced/wrote 'nothing' of quality during that stage of her life. In the course of the book's 300 pages, we learn of Courtney's fondness for lists (who would have guessed she was an organized mess?!), cute boys (there's one poem/letter dedicated to the day that she will stop being promiscuous), and her true unbridled love for Kurt.

Those who doubt her devotion to Kurt really must read the middle sections of Dirty Blonde. Her passionate and intense love for Kurt and her dedication to Frances Bean are the parts of the book that really struck me the hardest. In an entry written in her late teens, Courtney declares that when she has a daughter, her name will be Frances (I guess Kurt had no say in this matter) and in the latter half of the book, we see just how much Frances means to her. We also see how apologetic Courtney is to Frances for the life she was born into and for having such a 'fuck-up' as a mother.

It wasn't until I opened this book that I really understood her own personal struggle with being a widow and how it has affected every single facet of her life for the past 12 years.

While Courtney Love might be one of the most overexposed and critically maligned celebrities of the past decade, it is also worth noting that she just might also be the most misunderstood and misinterpreted.