Rock ‘n’ roll memoirs are hit or miss affairs. For every insightful offering like Keith Richards’ Life (2010), there are a dozen pale imitations – onerous reads filled with foggy memories and questionable myths of glory days gone by, focused on backstage debauchery and gossip, with little in the way of wisdom about music and life. Recently, Hole and Smashing Pumpkins’ bassist Melissa Auf der Maur entered the memoir market.
So now it’s the 1990s’ turn. The memoirs by Dave Grohl (The Storyteller, 2021), Flea (Acid for the Children, 2019), and Evan Dando (Rumours of My Demise, 2025) are among the works chronicling the era, competing for your attention and money. Few, however, until the new memoir by Auf der Maur, have gone beyond clichés to offer a truly compelling perspective on the bohemian community of ‘90s rock, which was about much more than just music.
Make no mistake. Auf der Maur’s Even the Good Girls Will Cry delivers the goods on the wild side of ‘90s rock. She dives deep into her up-and-down relationship with Courtney Love and rock consigliere, Billy Corgan, her loving yet doomed three-year romance with Grohl, the rampant drug use, and the chaos that ensued when indie-minded punks like herself were seduced, co-opted, and abandoned by the corporate rock machine.
Through all the chaos, Auf der Maur seemed to keep her distance and equilibrium. She was the occasionally naïve, often reluctant co-conspirator with a sharp mind and pure intent, thrown into the cauldron at grunge’s peak. In this excellent book, she proves to be a wise observer and a skilled writer.
Even the Good Girls Will Cry reminds me of Tom Wolfe and his fly-on-the-wall account of the LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters from his 1968 classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Sure, she was along for the ride, but she wasn’t owned or wholly defined by it.
One of the most enjoyable parts of Auf der Maur’s memoir concerns her ultra-bohemian upbringing in Montreal. Her mother, Linda Gaboriau, was a stunning beauty, a globe-trotting muse from Massachusetts who left home to study in Germany and then Canada, and who became a writer and the first female rock radio DJ in Canada.
Step aside, Courtney, because the true centerpiece of this book, her greatest inspiration, was her father, Nick. He was a poet-turned-popular newspaper columnist and sometimes politician who once punched Jack Kerouac in a bar. Melissa’s free-spirited and independent-minded mother wanted a child, and Nick seemed like a good candidate for a one-night stand. He wouldn’t learn that Melissa existed until after her second birthday. Her parents married when she was five, but the union didn’t last a year. When Nick was on his deathbed, he would confess to Melissa that her mother was his one true love.
At 14, photography became Melissa Auf der Maur’s true passion, something she would have dedicated her life to if music hadn’t called. By 18, she was living in a crash pad she called “the Grunge Estates”, working as a cassette DJ and ticket girl at two local clubs.
The turning point in her life came in July 1993 when she saw the pre-fame Smashing Pumpkins at one of these clubs. She struck up a friendship with Billy Corgan, who she says, “would have more influence on my life than anyone but my parents.” It is Corgan, whom she calls her “spiritual fucking cowboy”, who would recommend her to take the place of the recently OD’d Kristen Pfaff in Hole, mere months after the death of Kurt Cobain.
Courtney Love becomes “the tornado meets philosopher” who will be at the center of Auf der Maur’s life for the next five years. In the aftermath of Cobain’s death, Love is a mess, but a captivating one – strung out on heroin and god knows what else, rising to the occasion for memorable performances like Lollapalooza 1994 and remaining a constant fixture in the press. “The best rock stars are also great publicists,” Love tells her.
Melissa Auf der Maur relates all the stories fans might want to hear about Courtney Love’s escapes from rehab, the long path to the writing and recording of the band’s acclaimed Celebrity Skin album from 1998, the descent and emergence from a drug hell of Hole drummer Patty Schemel and Love herself, and Auf der Maur’s decision to leave the band.
Before the ink drives on her letter of resignation to Love, she is asked to join Corgan and his Smashing Pumpkins on their (then) final tour. To sweeten the pot, Corgan agrees to pay off the debt she somehow owes Hole management after five years of hard labor. The music business is a real shell game…
Her somewhat conservative (or simply sensible?) attitude toward intimacy and sex is discussed in her three-year relationship with Dave Grohl. You’ll need to buy the book to get those very juicy details and read about her crush on Rufus Wainwright when she was in grade school.
Auf der Maur’s details about her two-album solo career are pretty scant, but you can sense that the bloom was coming off the rose, as the record industry was moving on from her brand of goth/metal/punk. The main story concludes on the morning of 9/11, as she and some friends nurse hangovers from a night of karaoke and watch the tragedy from the roof of her then-home, the legendary Chelsea Hotel.
In Even the Good Girls Will Cry‘s epilogue, Melissa Auf der Maur shifts to the present. In 2011, at age 39, she decided to leave music, writing, “motherhood was the only worthy out.”
Regarding the post-rock chapter, this would make a great sequel. I had the pleasure of meeting Auf der Maur and her filmmaker husband, Tony Stone, when I wrote a story about veteran rockers and their “second acts” in the Hudson Valley for The New York Times in 2022. Auf der Maur has dedicated her second act to recreating the supportive bohemian scene of her youth in Montreal by founding Basilica Hudson, a unique performance and event space in Hudson, New York, and by working on green energy and economic development.
Through it all, she has continued to work on her photography, snapping pictures at every gig and of every audience. Many of these are featured in Even the Good Girls Will Cry. She will be showcasing some of these as she discusses the book on a tour that will take her to locations in the US, Canada, England, and Ireland through mid-April 2026.