Purity and desperation
This came in the mail yesterday:
I was reminded of it while listening to the Courtney Love episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast. I fucking loved this book when I was young. I had a copy but I don’t know what happened to it. There wasn’t much room for books when I left home. I only had one bag, and it had to be light enough to carry on the train.
It says it came out in 1997, but I think I read it in 1998. I was sixteen. When Courtney Love was sixteen she was living on her own, stripping in Japan, getting deported. I was more sheltered. When I was sixteen my hair had just grown out of a bad haircut, I lost my babyfat and my little round cheeks, and we moved four hours away.
Every day, every moment when I was sixteen hurt (I mean, it sort of does still, but it was worse then.) Courtney Love was my icon, a doll, a wailing banshee and proof that a woman made up all of pain and dirt and red lipstick and scars could fucking make it (but oh what a price she would pay.) I kept her close in my heart as teenage boys mansplained to me about all the ways her music was shit and I nodded because I just wanted them to shut up and finger me in their disgusting bedrooms. She was a mould I could pour myself into. I couldn’t sing, but I could do something else…
Poppy Z Brite was my writerly idol. They say to learn to write you have to read, so I read and re-read the books I loved to work out how they did it.
Can you tell?
(My 1st fucking edition of this is from Poppy’s own collection and is SIGNED, motherfuckers, ahhhhhh)
Anyway, Poppy’s books are lush and atmospheric. All steamy-southern, beautiful boys kissing with tongue, all kudzu and blood. I didn’t know what kudzu was, but I could imagine and I knew the taste of blood. I wanted to entangle a reader, swamp them in my words like Poppy swamped me.
And then, this book. Courtney called Poppy to introduce herself when she was in New Orleans, they hung out, and then somehow a book happened. I thought if I was a writer with books maybe someone like Courtney Love would call me and we’d hang out and I’d write a book about them.
Purity and desperation. That was me when I was sixteen. Torn up with yearning. This book fed into all the things that built me into who I am. What came first? Me as disaster, or me emulating disaster? Nature or nurture? I like to think both.
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This is from a tangent I went off on in another thing I wrote. It is a tangent to go off on here, but I copy-pasted it and put it in a file, in the hope I’d use it some day:
The lines between generations are weird and arbitrary. The world changes too quickly now for people born between 1980 and 2000 to be the same generation. There are millennials who grew up listening to Hole, and millennials who grew up listening to Lana Del Rey, and if Born to Die had been around when I was A Youth, well… Even though (the tail-end of) grunge (I managed to catch in my pubescent fingertips) was about death and heroin and pain too, it was also about anger. Just you try to hold me down/come on try to shut me up. Listen to Violet and tell me she’s not furiously screaming to survive.
Lana exudes submission and a gauzy, beautiful hopelessness and would only ever snort heroin. Lana would never have tracks and if she did, they would never get infected. They say that the world was built for two/only worth living if somebody is loving you. Lana lay down in the face of hopelessness where Courtney kicked and screamed.
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Look, I GET being tired. Look at the world.
It’s just that I can’t escape Courtney’s influence. She helped me to kindle the kicking-and-screaming desire to LIVE, to SURVIVE and keep making. Hopefully that serves me well.
