by Alana Massey
After Kurt overdosed in Rome in early March 1994, Kurt and Courtney returned to Seattle, where they had a series of fights that were occasionally punctuated by urgent calls to their lawyers. Kurt wanted a divorce and to write Courtney out of his will. Courtney responded (and I’m ad-libbing here), “The fuck you are.” Kurt was apparently preoccupied with the circumstances of the overdose, and Courtney staged an intervention—that peculiarly empathetic yet humiliating ritual extended to addicts believed to be at or nearing rock bottom. It is a cleansing surrender for those who truly are and a brutal mind game to those who are not. In either case, Kurt was disempowered. And he wasn’t an especially powerful boy to begin with.
Courtney retreated to the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills the next day to promote her forthcoming album. It was a cold move certainly, though more negligent than cruel. Kurt and his best friend, Dylan Carlson, went to buy a shotgun, for self-defense according to Carlson. People do not, of course, necessarily announce their trigger-sad intentions when they buy their suicide weapons, so who is to say, really? And though there is a case to be made for his fear being of Courtney’s hired goons, it is worth noting that he had the kind of fans who later believed he had transubstantiated into his infant daughter and was awaiting their companionship upon her reaching adulthood. That he didn’t have a shotgun earlier is among the bigger shocks of the story, really.
It is here in the early spring, on the eve of a masterpiece being unleashed on the world, that Courtney, the previously merely greedy bitch, is most gloriously reimagined into an otherworldly instrument of madness and death. Kurt checked into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles on March 30. He stayed only two days before dramatically scaling the six-foot walls of the center despite being free to walk out the front gate. Why did he choose a method of escape when he could simply exit? Why did he return to Seattle and believe for a moment that he could go undetected under baggy jackets and large sunglasses? When Kurt left the center, Courtney sent a private investigator to Seattle to find him. One cannot help but think of Snow White believing she had avoided death when the huntsman took pity on her, only to find that she was still being doggedly pursued by a far greater evil. And just as Snow White bites into the apple of her own volition, Kurt likely pulled the trigger himself. “Some day you will ache like I ache” was a promise Courtney made good on.
Though I heard the murder rumors with everyone else in the first few years after Kurt’s death, Nick Broomfield’s 1998 documentary, Kurt and Courtney, was my first deep dive into any serious meditation on the possibility of foul play. An especially memorable scene involves a wild-eyed musician nicknamed “El Duce” claiming Courtney asked him to “whack” Kurt for $50,000 but that his friend did it instead. Despite his violent claims, the Duce’s bald head and doughy features come together to make him look like an overgrown but decidedly ugly baby, and he was killed by a train three days after he made his on-camera claims that Courtney wanted him to serve as her personal assassin.
In conjuring various iterations of Courtney the witch, I return often to her doll-infested homes and lyrics. The tradition of the voodoo doll and a number of other magical practices claim a person can summon death to a human target via a toy likeness and a sufficiently robust will to power. The magic books I consulted all warn that most death spells fail because of insufficient power by the casting witch or magician. But surely if the spirits would obey any kind of person, the demonic heiress to a rock legend drenched in blood would be it.
I realize, of course, that the cruel and supernatural Courtney Love I have fashioned in my mind is a fiction. She was born in the vulgar imaginations of those who felt they were more entitled to Kurt Cobain’s beating heart than the woman whose body bore his only child. I also realize that the image of Courtney on trial is easy to imbue with meaning given knowledge of the events that would occur after the recording of Live Through This. But I am hardly the first person to retroactively assign symbols to events in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s because I had a point to make. When discussing Kurt and Courtney with my best friend Phoebe, she summed up my feelings perfectly when she said, “Look, I don’t think Courtney killed Kurt,” then she paused a moment to grin and continued, “But I think it would be pretty fucking cool if she did.” And because Courtney herself has made no secret of her desire to attain the status of a legend, I entertain these absurd possibilities as a celebration of female brutality rather than the typical condemnation of it.
When given a choice between the girl with the most cake and the liar at the witch trial, I choose the witch every time. I prefer Courtney as the ancient sorceress convincing the public of her innocence. The disguise of the lost little girl who sabotages her own attempts to gain approval by dissolving into tantrums is a sufficiently degenerate cover for something truly sinister. I like Courtney the succubus, Courtney the bitch. I revel in the idea of Courtney as the thief of men’s genius and as the employer of assassins.
When evil is done to a person, it gets under their skin. If there is enough of it, it’ll sink down through the flesh and into the bones, becoming part of its target. For most of us, the pain is absorbed as poison rather than power. We see a world awash in women’s blood and tears. We endure claims that the most profound kinds of pain are the exclusive possessions of men, that they are best equipped to make art from this suffering. Instead of bearing witness to it, we are asked to be killed by it, quietly if possible. But Courtney did nothing quietly. She said in 1995, “The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I’m not going to die.”19 And she has made good on that promise. The word “survivor” comes up often in sympathetic profiles of her. But “survivor” has connotations of thriving, of some conquering of life’s wreckage rather than a dwelling in it. Witches do not survive; they simply refuse to die.
In the witch trials of seventeenth-century New England, authorities would put the accused in water and use her flotation as evidence of rejecting baptism—and she would submerge just enough to get them to pull her back to shore. They would strip her naked in search of demonic markings, only to find flawless flesh where a pox had been rumored. They would throw her into a rushing river and she would fucking swim. And perhaps most fittingly, cakes were baked from the rye meal, the ashes, and the urine or blood of victims and fed to a dog. If the dog exhibited signs of bewitchment, it was considered evidence that witchcraft was at play. But unlike the unwitting dogs of this coarse ritual, the human public actively consumed the blood and detritus of Kurt and fell willingly enchanted. We are never sated in our appetite for that which would destroy itself. It is we who are offered a taste and beg for more.
The rituals by which we humiliate women have migrated from folklore-inspired trials of the body to more sterile but no less degrading assassinations of character. Courtney foretold their brutality before enduring it herself. I have lived in this world that she warned us girls about. I have loved the kind of man who loved only certain things because he loved to see them break, to borrow a phrase. I have not seen a fraction of the cruelty that the world is capable of, but I have trembled often enough in the aftershocks of my own resistance to a world built to break me to know that female brutality is not just an acceptable response, it is the most sensible one, too. But my heart is home to docile rage because I am afraid: afraid I don’t know how to wield my own viciousness with any expertise and afraid that once I do know how, I won’t stop until the fire I set can be seen from space. This is why in my personal mythology of Courtney, she has mastered not only the art of the supernatural foul play necessary to wreak havoc on the world, but the practical skills of restraint and deception that elevate such magic. The end result is a world begging for the mercy of a deathless woman, and her grinning reply that they were asking for it.
Our Sisters Shall Inherit the Sky
On the Lisbon Sisters and the Misnomer of The Virgin Suicides
BEFORE I READ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, I read about how Josh Hartnett asked Kirsten Dun
st to her prom—at the bidding of Sofia Coppola, who was directing them both in the film adaptation of the book. I came across the story flipping through back issues of Seventeen magazine while I was taking PE as a summer school course. I was at once resentful and enamored. It was a Hollywood anecdote sticky with charm, from the fact that teen actress Dunst had a confidante in the young director Coppola, to Hartnett the heartthrob with a heart of gold being a good sport and asking his younger costar to the dance.
Dunst ultimately chose to skip the prom entirely, baffling and devastating my fifteen-year-old self. I could not get a date of any kind, much less one with a highly desirable movie star four years my senior. I saw myself as the inheritor of bad genes that rendered me thicker than my peers and destined for a cruelly obscure suburban existence. And this feeling only sank deeper when faced with Dunst’s decision to opt out of a coveted role in the important social ritual of prom. I blamed what I decided was her effortless thinness and only mildly deserved fame. I silently hurled unfair and inaccurate assumptions at her charmed life, foisting my inadequacy at her in accusations she would never hear.
At the end of the summer, my sister Nova and I went to see The Virgin Suicides in a small movie theater in downtown San Diego when it finally found its way into cities beyond New York and Los Angeles. It was still a gamble on Nova’s part to take me to an R-rated movie because she had to buy my ticket and then hope against hope that I would not be asked for an ID at the ticket counter. But Nova was inclined then and is inclined even now to believe in the magical properties of sisterhood, that there was something about blood and secrets and being girls that elevated us. My sister and I were born on the same date three years apart under the sign of Gemini, the twins. Our shared birthday and the particular star sign have given a cosmic edge to our sisterhood that I am sure all sisters share, but I have the benefit of real mythology to back it up.
Greek mythology is scattered with clusters of sisters who offer moral instruction, and I have infused our own origin story with similar cosmic heft for my entire life. My sister, too, was preoccupied with the stars; one year she cut out a gold foil star and glued it to a blue cardboard block the size of a playing card and wrote a message on the back of it, dedicating a star to me. And so it was no surprise that Nova, whose name means “star,” took in the melancholy ’99 tribute to teenage tedium alongside me, whose name means “child,” with above-average levels of youthful despair and recognition. Though Josh Hartnett was the designated dreamboat of the film as Trip Fontaine, it was the five girls playing the Lisbon sisters with whom I was distraught to part ways when the credits rolled.
Hanna R. Hall appears on-screen as the living Cecilia only for a few minutes, but she makes an enchanting specter in appearances later on. Of all the Lisbon sisters, she had the most courage in her conviction that death was the appropriate response to life as it had been handed to her. Hall had played the child version of Jenny in Forrest Gump five years earlier, so when she jumped to her death in The Virgin Suicides, I could not help but recall the failure of her prayer from the earlier film, “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far, far away.” It failed this time, too.
My anger at Dunst for turning down Hartnett melted as she retreated into the character of Lux, the fourteen-year-old Lisbon sister whose disaffectedness seems to spread the suicide contagion most aggressively in the household. Chelse Swain plays Bonnie, the sister I later learned was characterized by a sharp nose, a long neck, and substantial height in Jeffrey Eugenides’s book. Swain possessed none of these markers, but she was the lesser-known sister of Dominique Swain, an actress made famous briefly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and so it seemed especially fitting that she was the lost middle sister. A. J. Cook plays Mary, who was the most vain of the Lisbon sisters, and when animated by Cook’s lovely smile and gentle features, it is easy to see why. Therese, the most awkward and intellectual sister, is played by Leslie Hayman, who never appeared in another film but who looked like a popular girl from my high school and so will always be famous to me. I bought the novel the following day and envisioned the Lisbon sisters as the girls who brought them to life on-screen, and I have never been able to separate the two.
I devoured the sedulously constructed dreamscape of Eugenides’s debut novel as only a fantasizing teenager would. That I could be so easily convinced of the sex appeal of suburban Detroit in 1974 is both a credit to the book’s artful prose and an indicator of how green I thought grass was on the other side of wherever I stood. The story is narrated by a group of grown men who as boys were infatuated with the five Lisbon sisters, a brood of peculiar blond teen girls, and who, from the boys’ perspective, were composed almost entirely of feminine mysteries and reedy limbs. Following the suicide of the youngest sister, Cecilia, the girls begin a retreat from the world that eventually culminates in all four of the remaining sisters killing themselves. There are plenty of events in between these deaths: a homecoming dance, lots of sex on the Lisbon household roof, a protest against an ongoing municipal tree removal project, and several phone calls consisting entirely of records playing rather than people speaking. But at its core, the story is fan fiction about girls the boys could never really hope to know.
The Virgin Suicides is also a lie, starting with the title and running through to the very last words. Of the five Lisbon sisters who die by their own hands, there is at least one confirmed loss of virginity and plenty of subsequent sex. The speculative fiction begins soon after in the retelling of Cecilia’s first suicide attempt, but grows more glaring in the lead-up to a party that the Lisbons throw in order to cheer up Cecilia, the reluctant survivor of her own slashed wrists. The men narrating the story are positively horny at the memory of receiving handmade construction-paper invitations to the party. “It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.” The boys are invited to a party that is designed to save a thirteen-year-old girl’s life, and they deduce that it was their names and addresses the sisters labored over most meticulously in their planning. If the sisters believe that drowning out the call of oblivion that beckons their baby sister toward death with party music is at least a close second, they do not say as much. Cecilia kills herself in the middle of the party, which one might think would render the boys gentler with the objects of their affection. One might think.
Instead, they write of a more urgent obsession: “In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander.” As the Lisbon girls develop ever-stranger wanderings of mind and body, the boys obsess more actively about their interior lives and speculate accordingly.
I recall a craving to be precisely this kind of object of infatuation when I was a teenager reading the book. I wanted a boy to look at me and see the mystery of my suffering and, instead of being repulsed by my emotions, to want to draw closer, to know more. But what the boys call observation feels much more like surveillance when rereading the text. My teen misery was mostly of my own making, a nagging sense of being incomplete but without any tangible loss to justify such feelings. The boys’ preoccupation is with the very private grief of losing one of your own. I know that as an adult woman, I should forgive the indelicate ways teen boys treat teen girls, even in their own speculations. I know, too, that they are fictions dissecting fictions. And yet I cannot stop myself from becoming fifteen again, staring down the prospect of a whole lifetime ahead of me without my sister and not screaming at the crude and incompetent analysis that would understate the loss of my sister, the girl whom even my infant self wanted to emulat
e so badly that I snatched her birthday. She is no less a part of me than my own beating heart. As an adult woman, I am eager to protect young girls from these crude and incompetent analyses, even if they are fictions dissecting fictions.
Though the boys never admit as much, it is crucial that the Lisbon sisters are all thin and beautiful within reason. There are a handful of imperfect features among them but nothing that would make the sum of each one’s parts less than desirable. In the safety of being attractive, their eccentricities are as precious as their bodies. Their bodies protect all eccentricity from becoming “strange” or “gross” in the way similar predilections are characterized when possessed by heavier or uglier girls. From the distance at which the boys spy on them, everything about the girls is a source of fascination. They are blank canvases onto which they can project their own stories of perfect love and trust and see it reflected back at them.
These half-formed ideations are flawless because they are incomplete, perfect only because they are so ill-conceived. The girls are mysterious but long to be known. They are (mostly) chaste, but they also crave. And above all, they are dead. And dead girls don’t write stories. The last year of the Lisbon sisters’ lives is instead governed on paper by the wandering imaginations of boys at their periphery—or, rather, the men the boys become. They narrate the story of the girls as a group of adults loving what they couldn’t have, seeing the sisters only from the distances between suburban windows and adjacent lockers. The men who narrate are softened by their surrender to age and hardened to the women they married for having aged into the fullness of living real human lives. They resent these women for forcing them to reckon with the full humanity of women in a way that the dreamy Lisbon sisters never forced them to. The Lisbon sisters died before they ever came close enough to reveal their second and third dimensions. Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are phantoms twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men’s aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.