“Kurt’s ghost looms like a giant shadow over our band,” writes Melissa Auf der Maur in her lustrous new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry.
Largely a rock memoir that slides back to the 1990s – covering her time with the groundbreaking and controversial band Hole and her relationship with its frontwoman Courtney Love, whom she paints as a complicated goddess. It is a book swimming in both excess and erudition. But also, trauma. Grief and denial smooshed inside the debauchery.
There were, in fact, two ghosts with her on that world-turning adventure: Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, whose suicide provoked a generational mourning if there ever was one, but also Hole’s erstwhile bassist, Kristen Pfaff, who died around the same time from a heroin overdose, and whom Auf der Maur was recruited to replace.
No wonder the whole band was, at one point, instructed to go to therapy together, as she recalls in the book. “I found comfort in the chaos,” Auf der Maur, 53, muses now on a call from her home in New York’s Hudson Valley.
In many ways, she had been preparing all her life for that eventual whirlwind, having grown up in a bubble of bohemia in Montreal with two larger-than-life parents – her mother, Linda, a “frontline feminist” who took Melissa to Africa when she was two, simply out of wanderlust, and her father, Nick, “the unofficial mayor of Montreal,” who was a prominent columnist, broadcaster, local politician for a spell, and an uncontested bon vivant.
As much as hers is a music memoir, it’s also a wonderful Montreal memoir, particularly in its earliest chapters. A poignant portrait of a time in the Canadian metropolis, in the final gasp of the last century – pre-social media and in the midst of Quebec’s political upheaval – where Auf der Maur was childhood friends with Rufus Wainwright, as she also details in the book. When I ask, “What part of Montreal still lives inside you?” she’s quick to answer: “The dreamer, the poetic, the fantasy freak. You cannot deny the poetry and romance of Montreal. It’s infused.”
“My father’s wife was Montreal,” she adds, laughing. “Because no other women stuck.”
As her book unfolds, it increasingly takes on a kind of alt-rock Alice in Wonderland feel, a “travelling circus” that takes her everywhere: from Tokyo to the Arctic Circle (where Hole has its strangest gig), from the VMAs to Milan Fashion Week (when Donatella Versace rolls out the red carpet for her and Love). Along the way, there are reminiscences of her long-time romance with Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighter frontman Dave Grohl, her passion for photography, a consideration of the very ’90s idea of “selling out,” and her time working as the bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins after she left Hole in 1999.
Distance: what she needed to write this autobiography, she acknowledges. She wrote it to unpack it all for herself, but also to be a more mindful parent to her 12-year-old daughter. “I’m doing this for her,” she says about the child she shares with husband Tony Stone, an indie filmmaker.
Growing up, music was her everything. Books, less so, she readily admits. Reading, however, has steadily crept into her life as she has aged. “It’s a later-in-life thing for me.” Now an author herself, she took a moment to tell us a little about her biblio journey.
What’s the best book you’ve read this year?
The two books I have chosen are both follow-up memoirs: Sally Mann’s Art Work: On the Creative Life and Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels. Like Patti’s, Sally’s first memoir was kind of like “hot topics,” the nuts and bolts of their lives and what they are best known for. Both their follow-ups are deeper dives. Second acts. I loved them.
What book can’t you wait to dive into?
A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. It’s his book about where humanity is going.
What’s your favourite book of all time?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers [a writer beloved and befriended by Tennessee Williams]. I am not an avid reader of fiction, but I found these, and they are my favourites. Both classics.
What book completely changed your perspective?
A book called Many Lives, Many Masters. By Brian D. Weiss, a psychotherapist. It didn’t change the way I thought, but it did reinforce ideas I already had.
If you could have dinner with any author, living or dead, who would it be?
Happily, I would want to be in Paris in the wild, bohemian days with Gertrude Stein and the gang.
The Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, will host a book launch and conversation with Melissa Auf der Maur on March 21st, to be followed by an exhibition in the fall titled Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs
