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 Mother’s Daughter is Linda Carroll’s 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 Carroll’s gifted storytelling, Her Mother’s 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. Advance Praise for Her Mother’s Daughter “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 woman’s 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 mother’s daughter.” —Demitri F. Papolos, M.D., and Janice Papolos, authors of The Bipolar Child 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. CHAPTER 1 "This is your daughter." Her raspy voice on the telephone turns an ordinary statement into an accusation. "Hello, Courtney," I say, bracing myself. I can't remember the last phone call that didn't end with screams and tears on her end and stony responses on mine. It has been years since we spoke with ease. "I thought you'd like to know--I'm three months pregnant." I hear my own sharp intake of breath and feel the sudden rush of emotions: fear, joy, dread, shock. I search for the next thing to say, the right thing ; everything I think of seems hollow. It would be absurd if it weren't so painful. For the first time I am going to be a grandmother--yet I cannot even utter a sigh that isn't filtered through the screen of my own caution. "That's very exciting news, Courtney," I manage. "Guess what else, Mother? I just married a prince. He's the biggest rock star in the world." Then I register the shock: she got married, and I hadn't been informed. Now she is going to have a child. Things didn't start out this way, so guarded, so wary. Courtney was my first child, born July 9, 1964, in the middle of the afternoon. I heard her cries, soft, then louder, and I reached for her. Nothing prepared me for that moment. Receiving her into my arms, I knew she was a miracle, a mystery entering the world. I couldn't believe this perfect baby had come from my body. Until that moment, babies had held little interest for me. Yet from the instant I held Courtney, I felt that I was born to be a mother. In those first weeks, I inhaled her scent deeply--she smelled like wildness, wrapped in wind-dried sheets with a hint of Breck baby shampoo in her hair. Get that baby on a schedule, Dr. Spock advised. But I knew what was right for her; I could feel it in my bones. Instinctively, I matched my timetable to hers, sleeping and waking when she did. She was so smart: she crawled and walked months before the baby charts said she would. At one year, she was using short sentences. People marveled at how articulate she was. My concern was what happened when she became upset. At times she cried so hard, it was