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wadesworld's review against another edition
3.0
Less diary and more a photo journey with scribbles. Regardless she remains my favorite female rocker.
prosewhore's review against another edition
5.0
I've had an odd "relationship" with Courtney Love.
I used to loathe her, as an early teen I bought into all the conspiracy theories surrounding Kurt's death (because I didn't know enough about the situation, marriage, careers of these two people to make my own opinion + was young + had internalised misogyny A LOT + like a lot of people couldn't understand why someone like Kurt wasn't still alive..)
I've grown a lot since then and a couple of years ago maybe I decided to give Hole a second chance and became absolutely infatuated with Courtney.
I can see bits of myself in her while still aspire to be as great and successful as her. This woman is a force of nature, a survivor and there are few in the industry who are so ready to openly show their cracks and with so much dignity.
Of course she is a legend and a genius, and while I love Baudelaire and Poe if you ask me who my favourite poet is, she immediately comes to mind.
I received this book for my birthday and devoured it since. It's a collection of diary entries and alongside come photographs, copies of letters, postcards etc.. I've got the hardcover edition and it's a lot bigger and longer than I had imagined.
This is not a replacement for a biography. If you start reading this without knowing much about her life, while I'm sure you could still enjoy reading her words, I don't think you would quite grasp the essence of her personality. A lot is missing of course, I personally would have loved to read more about the time she spent -stripping etc- abroad with her friends as a teen. For fans however, I think this is great and helps to understand her and the way she thinks, writes etc better.
For me I'd say, it confirmed everything I already knew about her, how incredibly smart she is, how resilient and yet sensitive (in the best of ways).
We get to read about her love for her daughter, which is a part of her life she usually keeps more private (understandably).
She kept it really classy though, if you are looking for celebrity gossip, horrible details about her life, as a child, as a widow, single mum etc, it's not in there! I think both out of respect for other, herself and for privacy.
As someone that writes a lot and dabbles in poetry, I found it really interesting to see the evolution of songs, some we do know as the public, where just a few lines stuck and the feel changed completely or bits of writing jotted down at different times that got mixed together later on.. Aborted pieces. etc..
It's also a very well edited, a truly beautiful book to have on display.
Personally I think I've fallen even more in love with this wonderful lady, this is certainly a book I will go back to, I think it holds a lot of wisdom.
Edit/// TL;DR: would recommend to all fans, helps you dive a little further into her mind and work. beautifully edited.
I used to loathe her, as an early teen I bought into all the conspiracy theories surrounding Kurt's death (because I didn't know enough about the situation, marriage, careers of these two people to make my own opinion + was young + had internalised misogyny A LOT + like a lot of people couldn't understand why someone like Kurt wasn't still alive..)
I've grown a lot since then and a couple of years ago maybe I decided to give Hole a second chance and became absolutely infatuated with Courtney.
I can see bits of myself in her while still aspire to be as great and successful as her. This woman is a force of nature, a survivor and there are few in the industry who are so ready to openly show their cracks and with so much dignity.
Of course she is a legend and a genius, and while I love Baudelaire and Poe if you ask me who my favourite poet is, she immediately comes to mind.
I received this book for my birthday and devoured it since. It's a collection of diary entries and alongside come photographs, copies of letters, postcards etc.. I've got the hardcover edition and it's a lot bigger and longer than I had imagined.
This is not a replacement for a biography. If you start reading this without knowing much about her life, while I'm sure you could still enjoy reading her words, I don't think you would quite grasp the essence of her personality. A lot is missing of course, I personally would have loved to read more about the time she spent -stripping etc- abroad with her friends as a teen. For fans however, I think this is great and helps to understand her and the way she thinks, writes etc better.
For me I'd say, it confirmed everything I already knew about her, how incredibly smart she is, how resilient and yet sensitive (in the best of ways).
We get to read about her love for her daughter, which is a part of her life she usually keeps more private (understandably).
She kept it really classy though, if you are looking for celebrity gossip, horrible details about her life, as a child, as a widow, single mum etc, it's not in there! I think both out of respect for other, herself and for privacy.
As someone that writes a lot and dabbles in poetry, I found it really interesting to see the evolution of songs, some we do know as the public, where just a few lines stuck and the feel changed completely or bits of writing jotted down at different times that got mixed together later on.. Aborted pieces. etc..
It's also a very well edited, a truly beautiful book to have on display.
Personally I think I've fallen even more in love with this wonderful lady, this is certainly a book I will go back to, I think it holds a lot of wisdom.
Edit/// TL;DR: would recommend to all fans, helps you dive a little further into her mind and work. beautifully edited.
library_lurker's review against another edition
3.0
reading kurt cobain's journals made me not like him anymore. but reading courtney's journals made me like her way, way more. she's really personable & thoughtful & a good journaller. i would have given this book 4 stars if they didn't include so much shitty poetry/song lyrics. it's like, okay, we get it.
also, ali & i brought this to the thunderbird one night, thinking it would be hilarious to read it. perhaps it would have been, but i was too busy pounding the rummy-rums to read it. oh well!
also, ali & i brought this to the thunderbird one night, thinking it would be hilarious to read it. perhaps it would have been, but i was too busy pounding the rummy-rums to read it. oh well!
kate_elizabeth's review against another edition
3.0
I read this slowly, a few pages at a time, which I think is the only way I could have done it. I like other people's journals, especially when they're put together like this one - ephemera taped everywhere, photos, random scrawls. I was really young when the whole grunge thing was happening; I used to hate Nirvana and I didn't feel one way or the other when Kurt Cobain died but reading it from Courtney's point of view makes me think differently about all of it.
pervinca's review against another edition
2.0
I discovered this book on my recommendations after reading Kurt's Journals. I like Hole as much as i like Nirvana, so i decided to give it a go.
This book, as well as Kurt's, is made of scans, meaning everything is written in Courtney's handwritting, which is pretty legible and adds a sense of autenticity, although towards the end of the book it gets more harder to read.
Now, what i liked the most about this book was the visual aspect of it. It was all made of little notes, there are loads of collages and drawings, photos, tickets, etc, everything annotated by Courtney, and its visually very appealing.
However, the begining of the book is a bit dull. Courtney writes in a very chaotic way that perfectly resembles her personality- if you've ever read her instagram posts, you know what i'm talking about. What i mean is that most of the book is made of very little fragments of text, and sometimes is very hard to conect them and therefore feel a sense of cohesion within the book. While this fragments are interesting and some of them have very beautiful quotes others make no sense and it makes it a bit hard to have continuity. For example, in Kurt's journals, most of the pieces, while not connected to the others, made self within themselves, you knew how he was feeling or what is he talking about, even if the next piece was about a completely different topic. Here it's a bit more chaotic and there are fragments within the same page that don't seem to be connected whatsoever.
Another part of the fragments are Courtney ranting about anything. With those i have a hate-love relationship. On one hand, i know what she's doing, for i do it myself: writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as it crosses your mind, without redacting it or giving it order, just to blow off steam, to share your feelings. And in doing this sometimes you are not specific- sometimes you just want to let go of your feelings and, in case anyone finds this piece of writing you just made, you want them to know how you feel but not necesarily who or what makes you feel that way.
Some of this pieces were wonderful, but in others not knowing what she's talking about makes it a bit hard for me to connect with them.
As the book goes on, she has longer pieces, which are the ones I enjoy the most. It's great to know how she feels and thinks about what's going on around her, being 100% transparent about how she feels. The middle was my favourite part, i wish the rest of the book was like it. You can learn more about her character and thoughts here, and you definitely can see how much she loved Kurt and how much she loves her daughter, and also how she is living her life.
Towards the end of the book, we get lots of despair poems or compositions. While i liked some of them, others were a bit chaotic and hard to read.
I think if i was a bit older and had lived through all of that, i may had been able to know what she was talking about in more fragments, even if those that didn't seem connected. Sometimes she writes about who she has seen or met or even fucked, but i don't know most of those people.
Overall, it is an okay book. I enjoyed reading it and liked the visual aspect of it, but i was expecting it to be a bit more redacted (like Kurt's Journal is). While i wanted to know more about Courtney, the book was a bit shallow in that sense: you get to know more about the way she thinks but not so much about her opinions on certain topics. In my opinion, there are some fragments that could have been deleted from the book and it wouldn't matter whatsoever, since they were so irrelevant- brutaly honest, as Courtney is, but still not revealing anything really.
I think this would be a great book for people who share Courtney's chaotic way of thinking. For me, it made it a bit harder to connect with her- but perhaps it was due to my expectations, since i did feel that connection with Kurt's Journals and was kinda expecting the same thing with this book.
That being said, she does mention a couple of times in the book that she doesn't want her diaries published and that she only wants her poems and compositions published, which may explain why the content of the book is what it is. I was expecting more personal thoughts and experiences.
This book, as well as Kurt's, is made of scans, meaning everything is written in Courtney's handwritting, which is pretty legible and adds a sense of autenticity, although towards the end of the book it gets more harder to read.
Now, what i liked the most about this book was the visual aspect of it. It was all made of little notes, there are loads of collages and drawings, photos, tickets, etc, everything annotated by Courtney, and its visually very appealing.
However, the begining of the book is a bit dull. Courtney writes in a very chaotic way that perfectly resembles her personality- if you've ever read her instagram posts, you know what i'm talking about. What i mean is that most of the book is made of very little fragments of text, and sometimes is very hard to conect them and therefore feel a sense of cohesion within the book. While this fragments are interesting and some of them have very beautiful quotes others make no sense and it makes it a bit hard to have continuity. For example, in Kurt's journals, most of the pieces, while not connected to the others, made self within themselves, you knew how he was feeling or what is he talking about, even if the next piece was about a completely different topic. Here it's a bit more chaotic and there are fragments within the same page that don't seem to be connected whatsoever.
Another part of the fragments are Courtney ranting about anything. With those i have a hate-love relationship. On one hand, i know what she's doing, for i do it myself: writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as it crosses your mind, without redacting it or giving it order, just to blow off steam, to share your feelings. And in doing this sometimes you are not specific- sometimes you just want to let go of your feelings and, in case anyone finds this piece of writing you just made, you want them to know how you feel but not necesarily who or what makes you feel that way.
Some of this pieces were wonderful, but in others not knowing what she's talking about makes it a bit hard for me to connect with them.
As the book goes on, she has longer pieces, which are the ones I enjoy the most. It's great to know how she feels and thinks about what's going on around her, being 100% transparent about how she feels. The middle was my favourite part, i wish the rest of the book was like it. You can learn more about her character and thoughts here, and you definitely can see how much she loved Kurt and how much she loves her daughter, and also how she is living her life.
Towards the end of the book, we get lots of despair poems or compositions. While i liked some of them, others were a bit chaotic and hard to read.
I think if i was a bit older and had lived through all of that, i may had been able to know what she was talking about in more fragments, even if those that didn't seem connected. Sometimes she writes about who she has seen or met or even fucked, but i don't know most of those people.
Overall, it is an okay book. I enjoyed reading it and liked the visual aspect of it, but i was expecting it to be a bit more redacted (like Kurt's Journal is). While i wanted to know more about Courtney, the book was a bit shallow in that sense: you get to know more about the way she thinks but not so much about her opinions on certain topics. In my opinion, there are some fragments that could have been deleted from the book and it wouldn't matter whatsoever, since they were so irrelevant- brutaly honest, as Courtney is, but still not revealing anything really.
I think this would be a great book for people who share Courtney's chaotic way of thinking. For me, it made it a bit harder to connect with her- but perhaps it was due to my expectations, since i did feel that connection with Kurt's Journals and was kinda expecting the same thing with this book.
That being said, she does mention a couple of times in the book that she doesn't want her diaries published and that she only wants her poems and compositions published, which may explain why the content of the book is what it is. I was expecting more personal thoughts and experiences.
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