Alana Massey was 8 years old when she first encountered the Oregon-reared singer Courtney Love, in a People magazine story about the suicide of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, Love’s husband. Since then, Love has become one of Massey’s pop-culture touchstones.
Alana MasseyDon Razniewski
Massey explains why in her new essay collection, “All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to be Famous Strangers” (Grand Central Publishing, 242 pages, $26), in which female icons become lenses through which she examines the intersection of personal lives and pop culture.
For example: Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow are Massey’s yin and yang of Generation X women. Britney Spears is the backdrop against which Massey explores body image issues. And Love is a release valve for Massey’s recollections of subjugation by men. “I like Courtney the succubus,” she writes. “I revel in the idea of Courtney as the thief of men’s genius and as the employer of assassins.”
“All the Lives I Want” publishes Tuesday, Feb. 7. Here’s an excerpt from Massey’s essay about Love, titled “The Queen of Hearts.”
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Grand Central Publishing
I have always bristled at the description of Courtney as “the girl with the most cake.” This spoiled, smug little creature was first introduced in Hole’s “Doll Parts” on the band’s sophomore album “Live Through This” and has reappeared in nearly every profile of Courtney in the decades since the album’s 1994 release. Love’s signature guttural moan sounds as much like desire as it does pity, and the accompanying image casts her as the impulsive girl child inside a grown woman’s body, a physically and emotionally clumsy brute. We are sad to see her suffer but also know that such children have a tendency to be insufferable. However, pegging Courtney as the gluttonous girl on the delicious brink of her own self-destruction is a mistake. And more and more, I am dissatisfied with the prospect of Courtney’s legacy being linked to a girl rather than a woman. I am even dissatisfied with the idea that her legacy will be linked to a human at all. Courtney Love, you see, is a witch.
An eighth grader named Meghan introduced me to “Live Through This,” along with a handful of other neighborhood converts, during the summer of 1994. This consortium of girls who felt a little harder than we ought to often lay on Meghan’s bed and stared at the pale green plastic stars affixed to her ceiling and listened to the songs on the album out of order. Meghan played the role of DJ, taking requests that our favorite be played next until we had listened to the entire thing. Until I saw the video for “Doll Parts,” I thought that Courtney was the crying beauty queen on the album cover. I imagined her waving to an empty dance hall, winning the contest on the technicality of being its only entrant.
Loving Hole as an adolescent girl was an exercise in comically misinterpreting lyrics but still identifying with their particularly female anguish. My friends and I listened to the stories on “Live Through This” as one might listen to a stranger frantically seeking help in a language other than our own. We detected distress but not its source. Hers were stories littered with drugs and shrieking infants and the kind of girls who never stood a chance against ending up in a box by the bed. This was the foreign country of addiction and panicked motherhood and broken hearts. There was an abundance of bodily fluids: talk of milk run dry and girls who piss themselves. It was all germs and embryos. The panicked cries sounded like something that might be waiting to happen to us, or even waiting inside of us already. Those cries broke our hearts — not just for our newly appointed queen but also for our future selves. A world of women’s blood and tears was the one we were on the brink of inheriting and would soon have to live through as well.
Excerpted from “All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to be Famous Strangers” by Alana Massey. Copyright (c)2017 by Alana Massey. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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