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The daughter of esteemed writer Paula Fox and the mother of Courtney Love relates “the curse of the first-born daughter” that has haunted four generations of her family.
As an adopted child, Linda Carroll created a magical world of her own, made up of dramatic adventures and the abiding fantasy that her real mother would come and take her away. When she finds herself pregnant at the age of eighteen, she is determined to have the perfect understanding with her child that she lacked with her adoptive mother. But readers will know better, for that baby grows up to be Courtney Love, desperately attention-seeking, deeply troubled, and one of the most talented women in rock.
Even as a baby, Courtney is beset by mood swings that no doctor can explain or cure. Her dark moods and paranoia escalate as she grows up, driving mother and daughter apart. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, Linda finally decides to find her own biological mother, and end the estrangement of generations of first-born daughters.
Her Mothers Daughter is Linda Carrolls story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter, a childlike hippie mother and a woman determined to find herself before finding her roots. Set apart from the typical celebrity memoir by Carrolls gifted storytelling, Her Mothers Daughter gives a fresh perspective on the elusive yet enduring connections between mothers and daughters, and reveals the true history of the wildly confabulatory Courtney Love.
LINDA CARROLL was adopted at birth, raised in San Francisco and only later discovered that her biological mother is the writer Paula Fox. Married at eighteen, and twice more before she was thirty, she is now the mother of five grown children, including singer/songwriter Courtney Love. She is a therapist and writer and lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her husband of seventeen years.
Advance Praise for Her Mothers Daughter
“Even if you start reading Linda Carroll's memoir out of curiosity about her famous daughter and biological mother, you'll keep reading to find out more about Linda herself. This is no celebrity potboiler, but a fascinating, beautifully written work of narrative nonfiction; Carroll unites the intimate perspective of a psychologist, the contextual sense of a historian, and the clarity of a fine biographer in one absorbing package. One of her central themes is what she calls the "curse of the first-born daughter," and it does seem that a tendency to live fascinating but difficult lives runs in these women's veins. But so, apparently, does the talent of drawing, holding, and rewarding our attention. Bravo, Linda Carroll!”
Martha Beck, author of Expecting Adam and Finding Your Own North Star
“There is a delicious fictional quality to this true-life story that I found riveting. In Carroll's deft telling, the book is a kind of resurrection of a family…. I think I loved Her Mother's Daughter most for the devotion that Linda Carroll has for her unusual family through decades of separations and unconventional journeys.”
--Terry Ryan, author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
“Looking backward and forward in time, this haunting memoir tells the story of a young womans journey to finding herself, her birth mother, and her daughter, Courtney Love. The candor and power of these pages illuminates the difficulties of all mother-daughter relationships, but offers a rare glimpse into that elemental relationship when it is shadowed by the temperamental features of early-onset bipolar disorder. Linda Carroll has grit and grace, and writes like her mothers daughter.”
Demitri F. Papolos, M.D. and Janice Papolos, authors of The Bipolar Child
Review:
"Carroll, a writer and therapist, bore quite a cross in rearing her fiery, unstable daughter, the rock icon who sets this memoir in motion by trumpeting her pregnancy. Fearing a 'curse of the firstborn daughter,' Carroll is seized with the urge to seek her own biological mother and mend a tattered matrilineal line. She discloses her past with a sprawling account of Catholic schools, friendships, romances and pregnancies in 1960s San Francisco, in prose mired with detail but often wry and touching. Carroll's social-climbing adoptive parents seem at best ambivalent, at worst cruel. In 1993, after Courtney's rise to fame and stormy estrangement from Carroll, the author finds her biological mother: Paula Fox, the acclaimed children's author who became pregnant as an abandoned teen. The two are kindred spirits, and it's a heartwarming twist that the act of writing, on many levels, becomes Carroll's portal to her past. The promise of dish on Courtney and the emotional reunion with Paula — along with Carroll's tender wit and poignant honesty (Courtney's siblings saw her 'as glamorous, but with sharp claws and teeth') — will keep readers soldiering through this often exhaustive history. Agent, Beth Vesel. (Jan. 17)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"We all have a fleeting period in our lives when we are neither too young nor too old. When we are too young, we spend far too much time looking into mirrors worrying about zits. Then one day, the zits are replaced by wrinkles and surfing past MTV, we — who used to venerate Janis Joplin and everything she stood for — catch a glimpse of another young woman and think: Yikes! What in God's name must... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) it be like to have Courtney Love for a daughter? We are now officially too old. But most of us, like it or not, have to grow up.
Linda Carroll seems to have put off this process as long as she could. In this memoir, she describes growing up as the adopted child of a woman named Louella who wore designer suits, cherished her mink coat, addressed Linda as 'young lady' and introduced her to everyone she met as 'my adopted daughter.' Poor Louella was born to be rebelled against; she's prissy, narrow-minded and class-proud. She didn't appear to like Linda very much either, but, of course, that was the way of parenting in those days. (The fact that Louella had lost a breast and her uterus to botched operations couldn't have helped her disposition either.) The family was devoutly Catholic — although the father's hands were always disappearing under Linda's skirt.
Linda was born to rebel, and she did. In fact, she rebelled in such an old-fashioned and predictable way that you almost wring your hands reading about it. She fooled around with some boy, had an ectopic pregnancy and almost died. Then she got into the San Francisco drug scene, had sex with an unpleasant fellow named Hank, married him, lived in squalor, had a baby daughter, got a divorce, took up with a man who hated kids (naturally), found a garbage man (yes, a garbage man), married him, got pregnant, got pregnant again. Then, when it looked as though the marriage was breaking up, what did the happy couple do? They adopted a mixed-race son.
Linda met a fellow named Mark in a seminar for people in failing marriages. They decided to leave Linda's firstborn behind — she'd gotten to be a bit of a handful — and head to New Zealand, where she — guess what? — got pregnant again. This time, the child died tragically. Linda got pregnant again. (If I'm counting correctly, Linda ends up having seven children.)
Meanwhile — let's skip to the present tense — that firstborn daughter, who will turn out to be Courtney Love, goes to New Zealand. She may or may not have broken a puppy's leg, and has told her little sister she's a Mongoloid. There are a few other misdeeds here and there, but hey, nobody's perfect. By now, the mixed-blood boy has had it with the whole chaotic scene and leaves. 'We had never imagined how it felt to be a multiracial boy in a white family,' Linda remarks toward the end of the book, but by then phrases like 'learned helplessness' and even 'playing dumb' come to mind. The author's imagination, her grasp of the most rudimentary rules of cause and effect, seem to have been out of commission her whole life.
But never mind, they're all still in New Zealand. Linda is still pregnant, that marriage (to Mark, remember?) is falling apart, and she and her husband manage to start a brush fire that damages their neighbor's property. They decide to return to the United States. A veterinarian from Down Under decides to leave his family and come north so that he can be with Linda. Courtney, by this time 16 and a veteran of every kind of trouble you can get into, demands to become emancipated and is. Soon she will take up with the rock star Kurt Cobain.
Then, as sometimes happens in these three-ring-circus families, everybody eases off on the shenanigans. Linda becomes a counselor and sticks with the veterinarian; it never seems to occur to her that Courtney's assumption of the role of frenzied, self-destructive outlaw gives the rest of this unruly clan permission to become respectable. You know the trajectory: zits to wrinkles. Acting out to good manners. Feelings to thoughts. All that.
When Courtney has her own child, Linda is seized with the impulse to find her own birth mother, who turns out to be Paula Fox, an award-winning writer. Everybody is friends now, except for Courtney and her dad, the unpleasant Hank, who appear to have washed their hands of the lot of them.
How you read this book will depend, I suspect, entirely on the kind of life you've led — how much you've cast your lot with the rebels or (and I admit it's not an either-or proposition) how much you value plain commonsense. (At one point, Linda fled San Francisco for the high ground of the Rockies based on psychic Edgar Cayce's prediction of a massive earthquake. But then a lot of people believe that the end of the world is nigh. It could be thought of as a respectable position.)
The author is at great pains to be as nice as possible about everyone in this narrative. 'Courtney follows the path of the phoenix,' she writes, 'falling and rising again from the ashes.' She would never be rude enough to say, 'That kid of mine might have a screw loose.' But loose screws abound in this book. Linda never considers the possibility that all those husbands and all those kids might have had some kind of an effect on those around her. It's all just a big mystery that things became so chaotic.
At one point, she introduces the concept of 'the curse of the firstborn daughter, carried down through generations of women in my family.' There's that familiar naivete again. (What? A multiracial kid who feels strange in an all-white home? What a surprise.) Because if Carroll really believes in this curse thing, what on earth, as a supposedly responsible grandmother, is she laying on the blameless and beautiful daughter of Courtney Love? Hasn't Carroll learned anything? Perhaps all that life experience was wasted on someone who profoundly doesn't want to grow up." Reviewed by Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
Given up for adoption at birth, the author is determined to have a perfect understanding with her own child that she never had with her adoptive mother. However, that baby grows up to be Courtney Love. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, the author decides to find her own biological mother and end the estrangement of mothers and daughters.
LINDA CARROLL was adopted at birth, raised in San Francisco, and only later discovered that her biological mother is the writer Paula Fox. Married at eighteen, and twice more before she was thirty, she is now the mother of five grown children, including singer/songwriter Courtney Love. She is a therapist and writer and lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband of seventeen years.
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Carroll, a writer and therapist, bore quite a cross in rearing her fiery, unstable daughter, the rock icon who sets this memoir in motion by trumpeting her pregnancy. Fearing a 'curse of the firstborn daughter,' Carroll is seized with the urge to seek her own biological mother and mend a tattered matrilineal line. She discloses her past with a sprawling account of Catholic schools, friendships, romances and pregnancies in 1960s San Francisco, in prose mired with detail but often wry and touching. Carroll's social-climbing adoptive parents seem at best ambivalent, at worst cruel. In 1993, after Courtney's rise to fame and stormy estrangement from Carroll, the author finds her biological mother: Paula Fox, the acclaimed children's author who became pregnant as an abandoned teen. The two are kindred spirits, and it's a heartwarming twist that the act of writing, on many levels, becomes Carroll's portal to her past. The promise of dish on Courtney and the emotional reunion with Paula — along with Carroll's tender wit and poignant honesty (Courtney's siblings saw her 'as glamorous, but with sharp claws and teeth') — will keep readers soldiering through this often exhaustive history. Agent, Beth Vesel. (Jan. 17)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
Given up for adoption at birth, the author is determined to have a perfect understanding with her own child that she never had with her adoptive mother. However, that baby grows up to be Courtney Love. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, the author decides to find her own biological mother and end the estrangement of mothers and daughters.
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