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It took Melissa Auf der Maur 25 years to tell anyone, even her husband, how her father had died. It was April 1998 and she was the bassist in Hole, the blistering alternative rock band founded by Courtney Love. They were on a brief break from recording what would be the band’s hit – and, for a time, final – album, Celebrity Skin, while Love, clean from heroin addiction, was pursuing a Hollywood film career.
Auf der Maur’s father, Nick Auf der Maur, was a Montreal politician, activist, newspaper columnist and career drinker who, in his youth, had been arrested for performing poetry in the street naked (with a gin and tonic in hand) and getting into a bar brawl with Jack Kerouac, who, he said, was a racist. He was also a heavy smoker. The lump that developed on his neck turned out to be throat cancer, which spread to his brain. When radiation didn’t work, he underwent an experimental procedure that cut out part of his throat and tongue, leaving him unable to eat, drink or talk properly. At home to visit him, Auf der Maur picked up the landline to make a call and heard her father’s voice on the line to a friend. He was saying he wanted to end his life, and he wanted help doing it. She put down the phone and then, later, spoke to the friend. If her father was going to end his life, she wanted to be there.
Two of her father’s friends came to his house and morphine was put into his kiwi smoothie – one of the few things he was able to eat or drink. Auf der Maur arrived after he had taken it and watched until his eyes closed. “You can let go now,” she told him. “Let go.”
It is one of the many breathtaking admissions in Auf der Maur’s memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, about her time as a rock musician in the 90s in Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins – with all the chaos, dysfunction, crushing of idealism, romance and tragedy that came with it.
I wonder why she has chosen this moment, and this book, to finally share what happened to her father? “Because I would never want my daughter to grow into a woman with her own mother still hiding from the defining moment that made me an adult woman.” She is about to turn 54; her daughter, River, is 14. “I felt this urgency,” she says. “Like a fire. I must face this. Face it, to heal it, purge it, to let go, move through it, move beyond it.” Her father was a vivacious, dapper, spirited man. “And it was going to be a short, brutal, unhappy last round. And laws, governments – not really my thing. But I do think that humans should do what they spiritually, emotionally feel is correct.”
Auf der Maur is sitting wrapped in a blanket, radiant with red hair, her cat curling around her neck, while a wood fire burns behind her in Hudson, New York. A snowstorm is coming, she tells me on Zoom, and her daughter has just been sent home from school. Is she worried, I ask, about the repercussions of sharing details about her dad’s death now? Assisted dying did not become legal in Canada until 2016. “I mean, so much so that I don’t really want to make a comment on it, but the book was reviewed by lawyers.” Writing her memoir has been a great unburdening: she describes the writing process as like a “waterfall” coming out of her. The book opens backstage at Reading festival in 1994, with Love parading around in fishnet tights and no knickers. Auf der Maur had joined the band just weeks before, after the death of the band’s previous bassist, Kristen Pfaff, who had overdosed on heroin. Reading was Love’s first performance after the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain, by suicide four months earlier. The band’s 1994 album, Live Through This, their first on a major record label, was put out just a week after Love became a widow and single mother to their baby daughter, Frances Bean. As Auf der Maur writes in her memoir: “Courtney was not OK. She was grieving, she had a young daughter to raise alone, and she was on drugs. On top of that, she was the most famous widow of the most famous dead rock star in the world. She was a raging, rolling tornado.”
Auf der Maur had come straight from playing gigs in tiny Montreal clubs to this tempest of a band, windswept with grief and pain, all of it playing out in front of audiences of tens of thousands. She had no interest in joining Hole at first; she wanted to go to art school, to continue her passion for photography and stay true to that holy grail of 90s values: never to sell out. It was Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, a friend and brief fling of Auf der Maur’s (also an ex of Love’s) who suggested her for the gig. Love did not take no lightly: she kept ringing Auf der Maur, eventually persuading her to get on a plane to Love’s home in Seattle.
What Auf der Maur found waiting at the airport struck her: Love, her daughter, and Hole’s drummer, Patty Schemel. “All of a sudden, my preconceived notions – that I don’t like major labels, money is going to screw people up and fame is going to make drug addicts even worse, all these obvious things – just landed differently. Because, at the moment, I saw the flesh-and-blood women, with a small child … And it felt like destiny.” Here was her opportunity to make music about the inner lives of complex women, with other women, in an overwhelmingly male landscape, with one of rock’s most raw and incendiary frontwomen. And there was an audience ready and waiting. She thought: “I’ll do it for the greater good.”
If this sounds lofty and idealistic, it is worth noting that Auf der Maur’s very existence is one of female rebellion. Her mother, Linda Gaboriau, was an American academic and literary translator who forged her way into the Quebec separatist movement after moving to Montreal in the 60s. She was also the first female rock DJ on the city’s English rock radio station, where she interviewed everyone from Frank Zappa to Leonard Cohen and was romantically linked to more than one of them.
By the summer of 1971, Gaboriau had stopped using contraception and, in her words, become “selective” about whom she slept with. One of these men was Auf der Maur’s father, who would not even know he had a daughter until she was two years old. “I am a product of a political act, I am not a product of love,” she says. Still, her father was thrilled. “He was an eternal bachelor – he never would have become a father if this wild woman had not come along and given him this gift.” He moved next door to her and her mother – and her parents did briefly marry – but the relationship did not last. They remained friends until his death. Her mother, now 83, is still a force of nature and still working, she says. “The decision she made, of being a single mother by choice, is a radical idea for anybody, even now. If I have friends considering it, I always say: ‘Go and have tea with my mother.’”
Compared with her Hole bandmates, Auf der Maur had a pretty straight childhood. Love was estranged from her parents; her father had lost custody of her after he was accused of dosing her with LSD as a toddler. As a teenager, she was put into care and was tossed out into the world at 16, left to sleep on sofas and find work as, among other things, a stripper. When Auf der Maur arrived at Love’s Seattle house that day in 1994, security guards flanked the outside, as distraught fans kept vigil for Cobain. The yellow police tape was still there, marking the room in which he had died. During Auf der Maur’s time in Hole, Love came close to death more than once. On tour in Paris, she ended up with an abscess so big from using dirty needles that she was hospitalised, but discharged herself and was back on stage that night. While recording in New Orleans, the whole band nearly burned to death in a house fire. There was weed and cocaine and a lot of heroin. And all the while there was Love’s young daughter – on her mother’s lap chasing her fingers on the fretboard during the recording of an MTV Unplugged session, crying in smoky clubs.
Auf der Maur’s anger at the record labels – the corporate machine that signed grunge bands and made them enormously famous, but never helped their artists deal with the consequences of that fame – is palpable. “No one was taking care of these people who were in major trauma. No one was helping them. They were just pushing Courtney and her daughter on tour, which was insane.” As the only non-junkie in the group, Auf der Maur carried the weight of concern for everyone. “Was Courtney impossible, difficult, a drug addict, terrifying, and even mean sometimes? Yes, she was. But it took me one second to understand that she was also a survivor.”
By 1998, not only had Love been accused of using drugs while pregnant, it was also being suggested – in a documentary and book – that Love had killed Cobain (an inquest had ruled he died by a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head). She tried to block the publication of both. However, the authors of the book went on a press tour with Love’s estranged father, who supported their theories. When it arrived in Montreal, Auf der Maur’s father rushed to the stage and caused a scene to halt the event. After it, Love sent him roses with a note: “The father I never had … Thank you for defending my honour.”
Auf der Maur had grown up witnessing her mother’s “fearless independence and absolute refusal to have society dictate how she was going to live”. By the time the 90s came, “it was supposed to be ‘women power’ time. But with Courtney, I watched society burn a woman at the stake.”
There is a lot of sadness and a lot of grit in this book, but it is also incredibly funny in places. “I’m glad you saw that,” she says. “It’s because you’re British.” Much of the farce, the excess, the ridiculousness, “it’s like Monty Python meets Spın̈al Tap,” she says, and laughs. There is the scene where Love smokes a cigarette through her vagina, and another where Auf der Maur and Love go to a Versace fashion show in Milan in 1998 and it appears that Donatella Versace has acquired them some young male “companions” for the evening. There is the date with Ben Stiller, and the time Love throws the contents of her makeup bag at Madonna while she is trying to record a TV interview. The connecting theme, though, is always the coming of age of a defiant young woman trying to find her place in the world.
Auf der Maur left Hole at the height of their fame and joined the Smashing Pumpkins’ huge world tour. She left after a year because, she says, she needed to find herself again. She had also begun a relationship with Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, frontman of Foo Fighters. They met at the MTV awards, when Grohl was incredibly rude about Love, with whom he had a longstanding feud. Grohl later turned up on Auf der Maur’s doorstep to apologise. Theirs was a deeply late-90s romance, two touring rock musicians communicating by faxes and phone calls. In her book, she says he was the first man to make her orgasm.
When they both came off tour, in 2001, she wanted to live a simpler, creative life, settling in an art scene in Montreal or DC. He had just won a Grammy. “I had assumed that having both of us come out of such dramatic, painful experiences in Hole and Nirvana, we’d share in a ‘let’s get out of here. I’m done with this party’ way of living. But he had unfinished business in show business.” As she writes in the book, he wanted a “wife waiting for him back home, while also being a gigantic superstar”. She says now: “There was nothing wrong with that. He can want that, he got that, and he did it.” By 2003, he was married, just not to her.
I wonder if she has seen that he recently fathered a child outside that marriage, and if that made her reflect on her decision to leave him? “No, I always just knew him from my experience at the time … He really is very sweet-hearted and pure.” She pauses, then adds: “I don’t know how pure you are after a lifetime of fame.”
When they dated, they were both at a fork in the road. “And he took one way, and I took the other.” Her path took her through two solo albums; the birth of her daughter with her husband, Tony Stone, a film-maker and a producer; and the setting up of the arts space Basilica Hudson, next door to their home in Hudson. Alongside this memoir, she will also be putting out a photo book and an exhibition from her large trove of photography from the 90s, and she’s working on a musical project. Love has also written a memoir, but first she will be releasing a documentary and a new album, on which Auf der Maur is appearing.
Her relationship with Love, who lives in the UK now, is “the best it’s ever been”, Auf der Maur says. “I’m incredibly proud of a woman who should be dead, who instead is evolving.” Her new songs, she says, “are going to be a gift for anyone who wants to understand a woman like her – and it’s essential that we have a better understanding of complex women like Courtney”.
I ask what she would like people to take away from her memoir. “A lot of what’s in this book, I did not think about for 20 years. I was running from the 90s, running from my father’s death. I was trying to define the next chapter, trying to move on so fast while not letting time do its work.” Now, she can see more clearly. The book is dedicated to her daughter and all girls, but really, she says, she wants anyone to read her story and “find, especially now with all these outside influences driven by algorithms, what makes you tick? What moves you and rings true to you? And simply follow that.”
