Framed by fame

LINDA CARROLL isn’t famous, but it’s impossible to frame her life without the strange and often cruel influence of celebrity.

She is Courtney Love’s mother but has never spoken publicly about her oldest daughter. And her biological mother is Paula Fox, the award-winning children’s author, esteemed literary novelist and memoirist. But Carroll, 61, now a therapist in Corvallis, Ore., didn’t learn that Fox was her birth mother until a reunion in the mid-1990s that forever transformed her public identity. Suddenly, Carroll was more than the mother of a profoundly self-destructive rock star. She was the long-lost progeny of a brilliant writer.

As her book “Her Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love” hits shelves tomorrow, Carroll takes on yet another role, as a writer publicly staking her place in this unusual lineage. Hers is an intriguing mother-daughter story, provocative in the ways now required of a bestselling memoir -- cinematic with dysfunction and surprising twists, plus the added bonus of celebrity. It’s also capably written -- making it, as Carroll’s editor Kristine Puopolo put it, “a pretty irresistible package.”

The memoir debuts just as the genre itself is being scrutinized and the public’s fascination with dirty laundry becomes increasingly conditional. As the controversy surrounding James Frey’s addiction memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” proves, it’s no longer enough to bare one’s soul in a memoir. One’s soul must be marketable.

For Carroll, this has meant striking certain bargains. She says she was initially reluctant to put her daughter’s name on the cover of her book; she spends much of the memoir distancing herself from Love’s troubled personality and hasn’t spoken to her in years. (Love, through her manager, Peter Asher, declined to be interviewed for this story.) It has meant admitting that she wrote the memoir, in part, to be “freed ... from all those questions” about her famous mother and daughter, then embarking on a book tour that will likely mean a bombardment of those questions.

And it has meant accepting the fact that while Carroll’s children, other than Love, will talk about their family to reporters to help promote the book, Fox, who could lend literary cachet to the memoir, is far too private to participate. (Fox, 82, also declined interview requests but called Carroll’s memoir “a very lovely book.”)

Thus far, Carroll’s bargains are showing signs of paying off. Though Doubleday issued a relatively modest print run -- 35,000 copies -- the early reviews have been respectable and media interest has been so strong that Carroll’s tour has been extended from three to six cities.

Publicity aside, this memoir marks a significant milestone for Carroll. She’s spent years on the sidelines of fame, watching silently as Love molded their family’s story to fit her persona, often, according to Carroll, exaggerating and fabricating whole events. Fox told her own provocative tale of longing and loss in a much-lauded 2001 memoir, “Borrowed Finery,” which ended with her reunion with Carroll. And now Carroll has her turn in the spotlight, for better or worse.

“Everyone has such an interesting life story,” she wrote in an e-mail. “But mine has some very dramatic elements and represents so many different human aspects.”

Setting it down

A lifelong diarist, Carroll always felt she had a story to tell. Her children grew up listening to stories of her time in Catholic school in 1950s San Francisco and her acid trips with Jerry Garcia in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s.

In 1993, Carroll was approached by book agents after persuading her most famous therapy client, political radical and 23-year fugitive Katherine Ann Power, to surrender to authorities.

And she once proposed to Love that they write a book together -- an idea that Love quickly nixed.

But it wasn’t until 2001, just as Fox’s “Borrowed Finery” was published to critical acclaim, that Carroll buckled down to write her memoir. It was impossible to ignore Fox’s long literary shadow.

“At first I thought I probably had some genetic prescription” for writing, Carroll said. “Then I read her books and I was so floored by her talent and skill and her clarity, it made me stop and think about whether I really wanted to take this on. Then I came back to: This isn’t about her. This is about me.”

Once the book was written, Carroll presented each person mentioned -- except Love and Love’s father, Hank Harrison -- with pertinent sections to see “if it was something they could live with,” Carroll said. Love wasn’t granted this courtesy, Carroll said, because she had “not been accessible to have that kind of conversation for a long time.”

In fact, it’s evident from interviews with relatives that Love’s behavior has left them at loose ends. One brother requested his name be kept out of this story. And Love’s sister Nicole Carroll, 38, a therapist in Portland, Ore., weighed her words very carefully as she spoke of Love. “She’s very difficult to really talk about,” she said.

Of Carroll’s five biological children, Nicole is closest in age to Love, and consequently they went through much of their family’s chaos together -- their mother’s many marriages and moves, their family’s years on a sheep farm in New Zealand. And although Nicole is very close to her mother and praises her as a parent, a writer and an expert at self-transformation, she admits theirs was a tough childhood.

“I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything,” she said. “At the same time, there are times I will look at my own children and think, ‘What was my mother thinking? How could we have been so invisible to her?’ ”

It’s this sentiment -- of loss and abandonment -- that seems to echo throughout this family, whether it’s in the gut-wrenching wails in Love’s songs or in Carroll’s lifelong mother fantasies or in Fox’s own memories of her Dickensian childhood. Carroll has named it “the curse of the firstborn daughter,” broken only by the acknowledgment that there is no “magic formula to erase life’s losses.” Fox, in her 1974 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, described this yearning as an essential part of the human condition.

“This effort to recognize is an effort to connect ourselves with the reality of our own lives,” Fox said. “It is painful, but if we are to become human, we cannot abandon it.”

Carroll was first inspired to track down her birth mother after Love became pregnant with her own daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, now 13.

“It was like something got unlocked in me [that said], ‘I’m going to find her,’ ” said Carroll.

A private investigator helped her find Fox’s New York address and soon, the two women were corresponding like star-crossed lovers, eschewing the phone for daily letters. They met in San Francisco and spent several days exchanging histories.

“As she began to describe my ancestors and where I came from, I was just blown away that there were so many things that defined me, that were a part of my real genetic history,” Carroll said.

Today, they remain close. Fox changed her biography in “Who’s Who of America” to include mention of Carroll. In her own memoir, Fox calls Carroll “the first woman related to me I could speak to freely.” And Carroll’s sons visit regularly with Fox, Carroll said.

Love, however, isn’t part of this inner circle. She met Fox once, long enough for both to decide they weren’t compatible.

Troubled youths

FOX herself, according to her own memoir, was sent to an orphanage as a baby by an alcoholic screenwriter father and cruel mother, who once said of her daughter: “Either she goes or I go.” She spent her childhood shuttled to strangers in upstate New York, Manhattan, Cuba and Hollywood.

She got pregnant with Carroll at 20, the result of a one-night affair, and gave her up for adoption. Fox wrote that she changed her mind 10 days later, but by that time, Carroll was heading off with her new adoptive parents, an optometrist named Jack Risi and his wife, Louella. (Both are deceased.)

Carroll was raised an only child, in relative wealth, and had meaningful friendships. Yet there were problems. Her father, she wrote, was often sexually inappropriate with her; her mother routinely introduced her as “my adopted daughter.”

From Carroll’s telling, Love’s role in her life was difficult from the beginning. She was conceived, Carroll wrote, when an intense and interesting guy she met at a party named Hank Harrison threatened to commit suicide if the 18-year-old Carroll refused to have sex with him. They married soon after in Reno.

After the baby was born, Carroll wrote, she dreamed of passing “some of myself on to Courtney, characteristics I would recognize as she grew.” Instead, Love seemed to grow more distant from her mother and more troubled by the day. In Love’s first year, Harrison became increasingly violent and emotionally unstable, according to the book, and the couple divorced around Love’s first birthday.

Over time, Carroll wrote, she realized Love had “a biology that created internal torment. Violent mood swings, troubles with attachment, terrible dreams, and a sense of persecution had plagued her all her life, the flip side of her creativity, generosity, and intelligence.”

She depicts Love, as a toddler, watching, unmoved, as her puppy tumbles down a flight of stairs. And then there’s the controversial claim from the book about Love’s weekend visits with her father from which she returned covered in body paint, talking about “magic pills” and troubled by hellish nightmares.

Elsewhere in the book, Love sets fires and reads porn at age 9, is expelled from nearly every school she attends and insists at 16 she be legally emancipated from her parents, only to end up a stripper living on the streets.

Carroll depicts herself as a well-meaning but ultimately overwhelmed parent, bullied by her out-of-control daughter. She sent Love to psychiatrists, hospitals and private schools, none of which seemed to help.

She acknowledges in the book that Love’s problems were exacerbated by Carroll’s own chaotic lifestyle and immaturity as a parent, but she couches the admission in terms that seem to reserve some blame for Love.

“My instability with men and difficulty setting firm boundaries had contributed to her struggles in life,” Carroll wrote. “I gave in far too easily to her demands, teaching her at a young age that with the right sort of manipulation, she could always have her way.”

Still, Carroll said, she hopes the memoir will humanize Love.

“To most people, she is a name that has a lot of drama associated with it,” she wrote in an e-mail. “But for me, she is my daughter, a real human being with a real mother who began life with her the way most of us begin with our daughters: determined to give her the best, knowing our child will never suffer in any way we can prevent and believing we can protect her.”

It remains to be seen whether a public ravenous for the next celebrity train wreck will be moved by Carroll’s book to empathize with Love as the product of cruel biology and a bad childhood. Regardless, Carroll’s book is bound to get attention for the striking questions it raises about genetic destiny, the role of nature versus nurture and the complex dynamic created when celebrity is added to that mix.