Dirty Blonde: The handwriting diaries of Courtney Love review

Like the true rock star that she is, Courtney love has ditched the convential and gone for the alternative.

Instead of a traditional biography, she’s made an adolescent style scrapbook of ‘bits and bobs’ from her life crammed into 300 photo-rich pages.

There are cute pictures from her childhood and rejection leters from the Mickey Mouse club right through to lurid shots in her drug addled widower days.

So there’s no prose to get stuck in to and no retrospective accounts of her much scrutized marriage to Kurt Cobain.

And on some pages there’s nothing but benal ramblings which her capricious handwriting makes obtuse. However, plough through her narcissitic thoughts and a fascinating person is revealed.

It’s a virginal side of Courtney Love never seen before, untouched by the vulturine press that contributed to her four year drug addiction, which she describes as ''nothing but dull, aching pain, misery and wrecked lives.''

Brief but honest statements like this are prevalent in the book, and touchingly genuine. They show a woman who has longed for fame from a frighteningly young age, “I’ll be a rock star, get an Oscar too”, she writes giddily at an evangelical camp in New Zealand.

The wild scribblings that have been hastily torn from decades of old scrapbook point to the bi-polar character that has troubled - and propelled her to stardom - throughouther life.

Like her music, these rough jottings of poetry and song lyrics are full of rage, isolation and a kind of self pity that would cross the border of self-righteousness if it weren’t for her CV as an international rock star.

That is after all what she’s famous for, and the book delivers her creativity in its purest form, which is even more compelling when you see the lyrics scrawled on the back of a postcard.

It won’t be for everyone, but for fans it’s a treasure, and even those who have ‘heard the name’, there’s enough of a story behind the person to satisfy.