Book review: Lifestyle distorted by addiction

This deceptively compelling memoir isn’t simply another dutiful reflection on a life spent in and around music: this is one woman’s quest for certainty

Melissa Auf der Maur discusses her new book 'Even The Good Girls Will Cry' at Strand Bookstore on March 17 in New York City. Picture: Theo Wargo/Getty 

• Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir 
• Melissa Auf der Maur
• Atlantic Books, €16.99  

Montreal-born bass player Melisssa Auf der Maur was a member of both Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins during a high-profile, American-led alternative rock movement in the 1990s.

She commendably picks over that carcass here, adding several fresh insights into a period that’s already had an over-abundance of critical treatment.

But what sets this deceptively compelling memoir apart is that it isn’t simply another dutiful reflection on a life spent in and around music.

Rather, her gossipy yarns counterpoint a far more interesting thesis about the vagaries of human connection: this is one woman’s quest for certainty.

An only child born to liberal parents and educated at a ‘wacky arts school’, Auf Der Maur finds kinship during her teens in music and photography and eventually enjoys a successful if reluctant career as a jobbing musician.

“Surrendering to most things being out of my control is what it means to be in Hole,” she concludes with the kind of wide-eyed bafflement that runs commonly among musicians.

Auf der Maur is especially strong on the practical financial reality faced by even the most commercially successful bands, group dynamics, and in particular the death-hold that a life on the road exerts on many of those who commit to it.

But she goes much deeper. A serial diarist, the author’s spent years in therapy and Even the Good Girls Will Cry — the title is the most obvious giveaway — reads frequently like an extended session on the analyst’s couch.

“Even if you are just the bass player, you are on that stage, giving and receiving,” she writes. 

Eventually, you begin to wonder … what it is you must have been seeking that led you there.

Her search for answers lead her to candidly un-picking a series of fascinating personal relationships, many of them distorted by the dark shadow of addiction.

Her father, Nick, a well-known Canadian journalist, and politician, dies by his own hand, riddled with cancer, at the age of 55. 

But the author is unable to disclose the circumstances of his death, and her part in it, for a decade.

“The details came out only as I was writing this book, 25 years after the fact,” she reveals.

The bond she enjoyed with her father was compromised by his alcoholism. Addiction and dependency are constants throughout: the Hole story is literally pock-marked by drug abuse. 

But the author is just as unequivocal when it comes to her own needs and goes into no little detail about her own emotional and sexual cravings, her numerous passing fancies, and the flings she enjoyed as part of a lifestyle that consistently disconcerted her.

Invited to Milan Fashion Week by Donatalla Versace in 1998 — where cocaine was served up backstage on silver platters — she refers to ‘possible whispers of a threesome’ involving herself, model Kate Moss, and then bandmate, Courtney Love.

But none of her relationships are as intriguing as the one she has with herself, which she teases thoroughly. 

And from which she seeks shelter in the ‘womb-like’ attraction of the dark-room and the lustre of music and popular culture.

It is only after the birth of her daughter — another only child — that she hints at some manner of personal freedom.

“I found myself falling into a hollow version of myself, a self that was nothing but beauty and style,” she observes.

Notwithstanding the legitimate anxieties of a new parent, Auf der Maur has found, if not an emotional closure, then certainly a space in which she feels more removed from the absurd.

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