It took Melissa Auf der Maur nearly 20 years to inform anybody, even her husband, how her father had died. It was April 1998 and she was the bassist in Hole, the blistering various rock band based by Courtney Love. They have been on a transient break from recording what can be the band’s hit – and, for a time, remaining – album, Celebrity Skin, whereas Love, clear from heroin habit, was pursuing a Hollywood movie profession.
Auf der Maur’s father, Nick Auf der Maur, was a Montreal politician, activist, newspaper columnist and profession drinker who, in his youth, had been arrested for performing poetry in the road bare (with a gin and tonic in hand) and stepping into a bar brawl with Jack Kerouac, who, he stated, was a racist. He was additionally a heavy smoker. The lump that developed on his neck turned out to be throat most cancers, which unfold to his mind. When radiation didn’t work, he underwent an experimental process that minimize out half of his throat and tongue, leaving him unable to eat, drink or speak correctly. At residence to go to him, Auf der Maur picked up the landline to make a name and heard her father’s voice on the line to a buddy. He was saying he wished to finish his life, and he wished assist doing it. She put down the cellphone and then, later, spoke to the buddy. If her father was going to finish his life, she wished to be there.
Two of her father’s associates got here to his home and morphine was put into his kiwi smoothie – one of the few issues he was capable of eat or drink. Auf der Maur arrived after he had taken it and watched till his eyes closed. “You can let go now,” she advised 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 got here with it.
I’m wondering why she has chosen this second, and this guide, to lastly share what occurred 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 show 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 crimson hair, her cat curling round her neck, whereas a wooden hearth burns behind her in Hudson, New York. A snowstorm is coming, she tells me on Zoom, and her daughter has simply been despatched residence from college. Is she fearful, I ask, about the repercussions of sharing particulars about her dad’s dying now? Assisted dying didn’t grow to be authorized in Canada till 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 nice unburdening: she describes the writing course of as like a “waterfall” popping out of her. The guide opens backstage at Reading pageant in 1994, with Love parading round in fishnet tights and no knickers. Auf der Maur had joined the band simply weeks earlier than, after the dying of the band’s earlier bassist, Kristen Pfaff, who had overdosed on heroin. Reading was Love’s first efficiency after the dying of her husband, Kurt Cobain, by suicide 4 months earlier. The band’s 1994 album, Live Through This, their first on a main file label, was put out simply a week after Love turned a widow and single mom to their child 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 enjoying gigs in tiny Montreal golf equipment to this tempest of a band, windswept with grief and ache, all of it enjoying out in entrance of audiences of tens of 1000’s. She had no real interest in becoming a member of Hole at first; she wished to go to artwork college, to proceed her ardour for images and keep true to that holy grail of 90s values: by no means to promote out. It was Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, a buddy and transient fling of Auf der Maur’s (additionally an ex of Love’s) who advised her for the gig. Love didn’t take no calmly: she saved ringing Auf der Maur, ultimately persuading her to get on a airplane to Love’s residence in Seattle.
What Auf der Maur discovered ready 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 alternative to make music about the interior lives of advanced ladies, with different ladies, in an overwhelmingly male panorama, with one of rock’s most uncooked and incendiary frontwomen. And there was an viewers prepared and ready. She thought: “I’ll do it for the greater good.”
If this sounds lofty and idealistic, it’s value noting that Auf der Maur’s very existence is one of feminine insurrection. Her mom, Linda Gaboriau, was an American tutorial and literary translator who cast her method into the Quebec separatist motion after transferring to Montreal in the 60s. She was additionally the first feminine rock DJ on the metropolis’s English rock radio station, the place she interviewed everybody from Frank Zappa to Leonard Cohen and was romantically linked to a couple of of them.
By the summer time of 1971, Gaboriau had stopped utilizing contraception and, in her phrases, grow to be “selective” about whom she slept with. One of these males was Auf der Maur’s father, who wouldn’t even know he had a daughter till she was two years previous. “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 subsequent door to her and her mom – and her dad and mom did briefly marry – however the relationship didn’t final. They remained associates till his dying. Her mom, now 83, remains to be a power of nature and nonetheless 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 fairly straight childhood. Love was estranged from her dad and mom; her father had misplaced 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 discover work as, amongst different issues, a stripper. When Auf der Maur arrived at Love’s Seattle home that day in 1994, safety guards flanked the outdoors, as distraught followers saved vigil for Cobain. The yellow police tape was nonetheless there, marking the room through which he had died. During Auf der Maur’s time in Hole, Love got here near dying greater than as soon as. On tour in Paris, she ended up with an abscess so huge from utilizing soiled needles that she was hospitalised, however discharged herself and was again on stage that evening. While recording in New Orleans, the complete band almost burned to dying in a home hearth. There was weed and cocaine and a lot of heroin. And all the whereas there was Love’s younger daughter – on her mom’s lap chasing her fingers on the fretboard throughout the recording of an MTV Unplugged session, crying in smoky golf equipment.
Auf der Maur’s anger at the file labels – the company machine that signed grunge bands and made them enormously well-known, however by no means helped their artists cope with the penalties 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 solely non-junkie in the group, Auf der Maur carried the weight of concern for everybody. “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 solely had Love been accused of utilizing medication whereas pregnant, it was additionally being advised – in a documentary and guide – that Love had killed Cobain (an inquest had dominated he died by a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head). She tried to dam the publication of each. However, the authors of the guide 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 precipitated a scene to halt the occasion. After it, Love despatched him roses with a notice: “The father I never had … Thank you for defending my honour.”
Auf der Maur had grown up witnessing her mom’s “fearless independence and absolute refusal to have society dictate how she was going to live”. By the time the 90s got here, “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 disappointment and a lot of grit on this guide, however it is usually extremely humorous in locations. “I’m glad you saw that,” she says. “It’s because you’re British.” Much of the farce, the extra, the ridiculousness, “it’s like Monty Python meets Spın̈al Tap,” she says, and laughs. There is the scene the place Love smokes a cigarette by means of her vagina, and one other the place Auf der Maur and Love go to a Versace vogue present in Milan in 1998 and it seems that Donatella Versace has acquired them some younger male “companions” for the night. There is the date with Ben Stiller, and the time Love throws the contents of her make-up bag at Madonna whereas she is making an attempt to file a TV interview. The connecting theme, although, is at all times the coming of age of a defiant younger woman looking for her place in the world.
Auf der Maur left Hole at the top of their fame and joined the Smashing Pumpkins’ enormous world tour. She left after a yr as a result of, she says, she wanted to seek out herself once more. She had additionally begun a relationship with Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, frontman of Foo Fighters. They met at the MTV awards, when Grohl was extremely impolite 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 speaking by faxes and cellphone calls. In her guide, she says he was the first man to make her orgasm.
When they each got here off tour, in 2001, she wished to stay a easier, inventive life, settling in an artwork scene in Montreal or DC. He had simply gained 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 guide, he wished 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, simply to not her.
I’m wondering if she has seen that he lately fathered a youngster outdoors that marriage, and if that made her replicate on her resolution to depart him? “No, I always just knew him from my experience at the time … He really is very sweet-hearted and pure.” She pauses, then provides: “I don’t know how pure you are after a lifetime of fame.”
When they dated, they have been each at a fork in the street. “And he took one way, and I took the other.” Her path took her by means of two solo albums; the beginning of her daughter with her husband, Tony Stone, a film-maker and a producer; and the organising of the arts house Basilica Hudson, subsequent door to their residence in Hudson. Alongside this memoir, she can even be placing out a photograph guide and an exhibition from her massive trove of images from the 90s, and she’s working on a musical challenge. Love has additionally written a memoir, however first she will likely be releasing a documentary and a new album, on which Auf der Maur is showing.
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 really like individuals to remove 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 will see extra clearly. The guide is devoted to her daughter and all ladies, however actually, she says, she needs anybody to learn 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.”
Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur is printed on 19 March by Atlantic Books, £22. To help the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery expenses could apply.
This article was amended on 16 March 2026 to appropriate a element of timing.
