What happens when a mother’s memoir crosses the line from autobiographical reportage to chilling payback?
Linda Carroll’s impossible-to-put-down tell-all, “Her Mother’s Daughter,” seems largely written to contradict the allegations of childhood mistreatment made over the years by her daughter, rock-star Courtney Love. Struggling between affection and contempt, Carroll portrays Love as an unruly child so impossible to manage she felt forced to give up on her.
In addition to chronicling her fractured relationship with her daughter, Carroll writes of an emotional search for the biological mother who put her up for adoption more than a half-century ago. In the genetic equivalent of winning the literary lottery, she is thrilled to discover that not only is her birth mother not “flat broke and toothless,” but she also is none other than famed Newbery Award-winning children’s book author Paula Fox.
The general reader can be forgiven for nearly dismissing this memoir as a clever way to capitalize on one juicy celebrity sandwich of a life. In less than a chapter, however, it becomes clear that Carroll has inherited her mother’s talent behind a pen, and the resulting story is propelled by the author’s addictively confessional tale of love and loss in counter-culture San Francisco of the 1960s.
Given up at birth by a woman who insisted on finding “a good Catholic family” for her baby, Linda Carroll was still small when her adoptive father began the sexual advances she spent her childhood fighting off. The author forged pivotal friendships in lieu of true family, got kicked out of parochial school and found herself dangerously adrift after graduation.
Soon she was pregnant with Courtney and married to a man whose drug-induced rages terrified her. When Carroll confesses that her daughter’s erratic behavior troubled her from the beginning, it’s easy to get the sense of an author slowly building her case.
After divorcing her first husband, Carroll embarked on a dizzying odyssey of serial marriages and new babies difficult for even the closest reader to keep straight without a notepad. Though determined to be a good mother to make up for her own deficient childhood, the author seems blind to her own egregiously spotty parenting even as she’s writing about it. (She adopted a son into her ever-growing family even as she was planning to divorce her then-husband; after a few years in her tumultuous care, the child was so miserable another family begged to adopt him. Carroll agreed.)
Divorced again, the author hooked up with a back-to-the-earth surfer and suddenly moved her burgeoning brood to New Zealand to embrace rural life. The upheaval proved disastrous for young Courtney, and Carroll’s increasingly clinical descriptions of her daughter’s evident emotional problems are painful to read.
Reflecting upon this period through the prism of her current role as a successful therapist, one wonders how she could ignore the distress Courtney experienced when her mother packed her off for a long string of unsuccessful living arrangements with outsiders. Carroll writes about this period defensively and insists that she needed to focus on her new marriage, new babies and all her other (well-behaved) children. The underlying message? Husbands and children can always be replaced with new ones.
The author’s intense anguish over Courtney’s adult allegations is genuine, but she decided to take action only after her professional reputation was compromised. “My clients began asking me if the stories were true. I felt violated and furious …” She tells of one particularly vitriolic phone conversation in which she threatened her daughter to stop “making up stories about me, (or) I will give an interview and tell every bit of the truth as I remember it.”‘
Apparently no mere interview would suffice; Carroll decided on a book. After so much emphasis on her troubled relationship with Courtney and the struggle to find herself, it’s easy to grow impatient for the book’s long-promised reunion with her biological mother, Paula Fox. When Carroll fails to devote a satisfying amount of time to exploring this important emotional turning point, it feels like an error in pacing. More than this, it’s evident the author is wary of writing anything to alienate Fox, possibly risking a second abandonment.
In the strictest literary sense, Carroll should not be judged harshly for writing this memoir. From a purely psychological standpoint, however, it seems like poor judgment to so ruthlessly lay bare the weaknesses of a mentally unstable daughter.
Far from halting what Carroll calls her family’s “curse of the first-born daughter,” the book will undoubtedly intensify the four generations of mother-daughter acrimony Fox first wrote about in her own brilliantly hash-settling memoir, “Borrowed Finery.” No matter how well-written or entertaining, “Her Mother’s Daughter” ultimately proves to be nothing less than a bitter act of maternal betrayal.
Andrea Hoag is a Lawrence, Kan., book critic whose reviews also appear in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle and Publishers Weekly.
Her Mother’s Daughter
A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love
By Linda Carroll
Doubleday, 320 pages, $24.95
