Frances often appears gracious and accommodating during media appearances, in sharp contrast to her frequently evasive late father and notoriously combative mother. But you often have to look hard for Frances in every story in which she appears because writers still tend to veil her in the features of her father. And while she shares physical similarities with both of her striking parents, the public still insists on casting her as Kurt’s beautiful shadow—ghoulishly demanding that she be like her father who died instead of the woman who insisted on living.
I tried to accept Courtney as the girl with the most cake for years, silently complicit in narratives that dismiss female rage as symptomatic of a juvenile character rather than the logical response to a hostile world. She was simply on a little rampage when she offered too many sexually explicit details about another rock star she had fucked. She didn’t mean to be such an embarrassment or such a bitch all the time. But my own transformation from girl child to woman, and the attendant punishments from the world, saw my view of Courtney shift. I surmised that these were not the missteps of immaturity but the intentional humiliation of her detractors in a brilliant performance of ignorance that disguised her true malevolence. It is in these moments that I see Courtney’s vicious bile as a rational reaction to the public’s attempts to keep her on trial in perpetuity. Now when I conjure the outsized specter of Courtney as a venomous witch, I see the woman I aspire to be rather than the clumsy girl I have so often been.
I do not know if I was naturally inclined to trip over myself or if I was rendered this way. There was being labeled a tease by my sixth-grade teacher for holding hands with a boy whose grades weren’t as good as mine. Or the time I was called a condescending cunt by a male friend because I told his drunk friend, in no uncertain terms, that he was out of line for saying he would love to hear the sound of his dick breaking my hymen. Or when at twenty-three I felt my own twisted sense of gratitude that the investment banker who raped me had abated when I pleaded that he not penetrate me anally. Or when my first sugar daddy held my head on his cock, not releasing it until he had fully ejaculated in my mouth and felt me swallow.
When I worked as a stripper, I regularly heard fantasies from male clients about running away with me, but these were really just stories about these men abandoning the women and children who relied on them. There might still be countless avatars of me being held hostage in the minds of men who would make me complicit in their callousness. For all the years that these vulgar haunts have lingered, so, too, has Courtney’s mordant interrogation: “Was she asking for it? / Was she asking nice? Yeah, she was asking for it Did she ask you twice?” It goes to a low volume sometimes, but it is never turned all the way off.
Like Courtney, I have also had the personal misfortune of falling in love with a mild-mannered man whose massive love for me still paled in comparison to his love of heroin. He was two weeks out of rehab when I met him, and he was gentle and handsome, and while we were together I lived in constant fear that I would find him dead one day. Even now, after living for years without him, I wonder sometimes if he will die too young. He had an extended relapse in our years together, and I spent the season trying to conjure a heartbeat from the shadow he had become.
I have learned that I crave the myth of a formidable woman rather than a little girl rotting from the inside out, and the witchcraft at play on Live Through This is but one example of how Courtney always had a stronger taste for blood than for cake. The guiding image for this revision is Courtney devouring Kurt’s heart. Courtney told Vanity Fair in 1995 that she had taken not just hair from Kurt’s head, as was documented in People the year prior, but pubic hair as well. “‘I wanted his heart,” she says. “I wanted his heart to put an oak in it.”8 She claimed that this is a Saxon tradition, but experts in medieval Saxon magic and folklore with whom I spoke had never heard of this ritual, though occult historians were quick to tell me that there are spells aplenty involving the extraction of a person’s heart to access their power. The image of the wicked queen in Snow White demanding the beautiful child’s heart delivered to her in a box comes to mind (Courtney was fittingly cast as this witch in a childhood production of the play). Mad with jealousy and rage that Snow White has survived in the wilderness, the queen transforms into a witch and hunts her down. Unfortunately, we are never clued in to how the queen was made wicked or if she was born that way. But a document trail through Courtney’s past makes it possible to indulge in the wild speculation that the curses she breathed into the world were a long time coming.
In a 1998 biography of Courtney, Poppy Z. Brite describes how Courtney was called “Pee Girl” by her peers because she was notoriously unclean.9 This was due to hygiene negligence in the commune where she lived. Her mother, Linda Carroll, told Vanity Fair that Courtney seemed to always be in physical pain, reacting to human touch with genuine suffering. Carroll also told Vanity Fair that Courtney had frequent nightmares and drew pictures of wounded figures while her peers scratched away at butterflies.10 Courtney told Spin in 1995, “I forever looked like I was seven. And then I got ugly; I was ugly until I was 25. But back then, I was usually one of the most attractive people in the room, except in an unusual way. Still, I knew what I had, and I worked the fuck out of it. And so when it was gone I really missed it.”11 A sensitive, beautiful child suddenly cursed with ugliness and tortured by ghastly dreams is an origin story that lends credence to both black magic practice and perhaps an equally unforgivable crime: mortal ascent to power through female cunning.