Girlhood at the Epicenter of Alternative Music’s Mainstream Moment
Hole’s Melissa Auf der Maur looks back lucidly on her 1990s in “Even the Good Girls Will Cry,” as I seek out memoirs by levelheaded women artists from the generation before mine.
Courtney Love’s feminist punk group Hole might be the only famous rock band to have every living member besides the lead singer write a memoir. I’m trying to avoid a bad Live Through This joke, but the undeniable context is that the white-hot intensity of being in Hole and around Love left its members with stories and scars. Drummer Patty Schemel offered her gripping account of heroin addiction and homelessness in Hit So Hard. Guitarist/cofounder Erik Erlandson released a collection of prose poems grieving his friend Kurt Cobain. And just recently, bassist Melissa Auf der Maur released Even the Good Girls Will Cry, a mostly nostalgic chronicle of her 1990s spent in and out of Hole, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the Montreal music scene.
Auf der Maur’s stint in the Hole spanned 1994’s Live Through This tour (mounted months after Cobain’s suicide and earlier bassist Kristen Pfaff’s overdose) through the making of and touring behind 1998’s Celebrity Skin (Hole’s commercial apex, also Love’s rehab and Schemel’s devastating relapse). In these pivotal years, we get to see Courtney through the eyes of her close friend: grieving in the bedroom of her Seattle mansion, then backstage ready to shock (she smokes a cigarette out of her pussy as a parlor trick). In private, Love comes across as more emotionally intelligent than one might expect for a professional hurricane, particularly in her letters and gestures towards Auf der Maur.
This is not to relegate Melissa Auf der Maur to the sidekick role in her own memoir, but as her therapist points out, she’s “always at the fringes of other people’s dramas.” That is the perfect place for a photographer to be, though. Auf der Maur dropped out of college to join Hole while studying photography, and her camera is a constant source of inspiration while out on the road. Her writing takes on the effect of flipping through a photo album; it’s not so vivid on the senses in a “you’re in the room” kind of way, but you get an earnest sense of the scene and its characters.
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