Melissa Auf Der Maur - Even The Good Girls Will Cry: My ’90s Rock Memoir
★★★★
ATLANTIC BOOKS
Just four months after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide, 22-year-old photography student and Montreal music scenester Melissa Auf Der Maur was thrown into the centre of a perfectly ’90s storm. After a romantic connection with Billy Corgan at a Smashing Pumpkins show, the frontman recommended her as a replacement for Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who had died of a heroin overdose.
Auf Der Maur’s potent memoir catches the precarious energy of being in a band with “tornado meets philosopher” Courtney Love as well as the era’s wider volatility, all anxiety about selling out and corporate compromise. A sober, sensitive presence in this maelstrom of grief and heroin, “Melissa From Montreal” can still be entertainingly indiscreet, detailing her former partner Dave Grohl’s sexual skills or Love’s X-rated cigarette party trick. It’s all written with such tender empathy, though, that the book remains vivid rather than lurid, a revelatory, humane document of a treacherous time.
Even The Good Girls Will Cry: My ’90s Rock Memoir is out now via Atlantic Books.
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