If you’re a music fan, especially if you are young enough to remember the ’90’s, you know who Melissa Auf der Maur is, even if you don’t recognize her name. She’s the woman who stepped into the bass spot in Hole when Kristen Pfaff died literally moments after “Live Through This,” Hole’s second album, was about to be released, which also happened to be not long after Kurt Cobain decided to leave the planet. It was an intense and disorienting time if you were simply a fan of the music; multiply that by approximately a gigaton if you were anywhere adjacent. Auf der Maur takes everyone along on the ride with the publication of her expansive memoir “Even the Good Girls Will Cry.”
But this isn’t just 400+ pages of stories about Courtney Love and Billy Corgan and Lollapalooza (although there is a lot of that, and plenty of people will be picking this up just to read these stories). Auf der Maur had a life and a presence before playing in Hole (and later, Smashing Pumpkins), or she wouldn’t have been even considered. She came of age in Montreal’s alternative scene, the child of unconventional parents, and fell in love with rock and roll.
