"Her Mother's Daughter" by Linda Carroll

Doubleday, $24.95, 320 pages

By Mairead Case
Published: February 20th, 2006 | 1:18pm

We usually read autobiography for either the extraordinary life depicted, or simply for an ordinary one written well. Linda Carroll's memoir, Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love could have fulfilled both reasons. Adopted at birth and married thrice before thirty, Carroll had five children, became a hippie and a writer and a therapist, found peace in New Zealand and eventually met her biological mother Paula Fox, the award-winning novelist and children's book author. Somewhere in there, Carroll dropped acid with Jerry Garcia--and did we mention that her daughter is Courtney Love?

Despite such a potentially fascinating premise marketed toward both Courtney fans and detractors, Carroll offers little insight. We expect details about raising a daughter, written with a therapist's clarity. We see Courtney humming Beatles songs in the family Volkswagen, seeing dogs and angels in the sky, breaking her puppy's leg, and covering her arms in marker-stars. Throughout, Carroll's refrain is unchanging. She loves Courtney, but she doesn't understand her-- and did she mention her own motherlessness? Carroll sees the obstacle in her relationship to Courtney not as her own misunderstanding of her daughter (we're all waiting for that line), but Courtney's lack of empathy for her mother's position.

As a writer, Carroll doesn't fare much better, grazing on isolated anecdotes and tangenting off in navel-gazing. Even the ordinary-life parts are poorly written, as peppered with random poetry and tired tropes: cherry-print dresses on little girls, Catholic guilt, and bloodstains. While it is unfair to belittle trauma simply because it is poorly written, I'd rather not pay $24.95 for clunkers like, "Sex had changed Judy--it made her more self-assured, more grown-up."

Nevertheless, there is a richness for those who wish to read in-between the lines. It's like listening to a favorite album backwards-- you get more, even if Robert Plant didn't exactly intend it that way. In several interviews, Courtney has claimed that her mother forced her to live in a chicken coop. Here, though, Carroll describes it as a redwood whare. She describes, "It was fully insulated, with oak floors, a Dutch door, octagonal windows, and a railed porch. [There were] shelves, a closet, and a new double bed." We wonder at the reality, and are neatly punched by the next paragraph. It eerily recalls Hole's early album Ask for It, with an eggnog-drunk Courtney leaving her "house" and wandering into a neighbor's field. Carroll finds her daughter in the grass, cutting her limbs with sticks. Rage, confusion, and self-mutilation: undoubtedly early Hole.

Those who remember Live Through This will find some especially poignant resonances: a young Carroll cutting the hair from her Nancy Ann dolls, for example. Yet the deepest chill comes when we connect the jacket photo with its original, as printed on the eight-page insert. In the complete photo, Carroll poses with daughter Jaimee, but on the jacket, the girl has been sliced away. Perhaps the feedback is too fresh in my ears, but I can't help but think of the implication--an estranged mother and child. As Courtney sang on "I Think I Would Die" and as Carroll might still feel, "I want my baby / There is no milk."