Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Pretty Little Dirty: A Novel by Amanda Boyden
Next story: Mencken, The American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore, by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love, by Linda Carroll

Doubleday, 2006 $24.95

If you are looking for a frothy tell-all about the early life and exploits of one of rock’s most notoriously rowdy and drug-addled front women, Courtney Love, it would be in your best interest to rent Kurt and Courtney rather than read Linda Carroll’s new, verbosely titled memoir, Her Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love. Though at first the memoir seems intent on replicating the exposé style of Deborah Spungen’s biography of her drug-crazed punk rock daughter Nancy, who also happens to be Love’s idol, Carroll’s story quickly becomes a sensitive inquiry into the nature of the myriad roles women take on in relation both to each other and to men and the ways in which these roles enrich and shape the course of a woman’s life. Love’s presence in the memoir is undeniable—the book contains memorable descriptions of Love’s conception while Carroll was on an acid trip and of Love’s violent bipolar outbursts as a child—but she is merely the ribbon tying together this rich and woman-friendly account of a young woman’s search for identity during the confusing and turbulent 1960s. Ultimately, the intense vulnerability Carroll displays in rehashing the events of the childhood she spent with her adoptive parents and the adulthood she spent searching for herself and her mother leave a strong impression on the reader. While Love may be the reason a woman picks up the book, Carroll’s colorful portrait of the female condition in this country is what will keep her reading.