KEY POINTS:
Courtney Love has released her diaries and they are full of what you'd expect - angst, ugliness, letters to Kurt, nudity and, yes, even beauty.
But being from this part of the world we looked for the bits about her time spent in New Zealand at a girls'
boarding school in Nelson during 1976. And what do you know, we rate a few mentions including the former Queen of grunge referring to our fine country as "Camp Kiwi".
Dirty Blonde - The Diaries of Courtney Love is compiled like a teenager's scrap book complete with hand-written letters, postcards, personal and rare photos, music memorabilia and Love's correspondence with people like actress Lindsay Lohan, musician Billy Corgan and fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
The first reference to New Zealand is her almost indecipherable scribblings on old Air New Zealand inflight notepad paper during her flight here on a DC-10.
On the next page there's a letter to a friend in the US (complete with four New Zealand 8c stamps) in which she describes life at school and which quickly turns to music.
"There's a neat TV show called Ready To Roll," she says. "It has all the pop stars singing their songs. Have you got the song Fernando by ABBA over there yet? I'm so bored with these songs Shannon and Boogie Fever - how bloody dum-dum-dum."
And that's about as much of a part New Zealand played in Love's life, according to her diaries. Although, strangely enough, in 2002 she recalls New Zealand again by writing the following next to an old photo of herself: "It's me, you know, mouthy, a little wierd [sic], late on puberty ... and my mum's gone nuts and sent me to Camp Kiwi - an Evangelical Born Again Camp which takes up an entire island, a little island in the middle of the two big islands of NZ. The man is preachin', he's preaching all sorts of fire and brimstone."
Later, her notorious visits to the Auckland Big Day Out with Hole, during which she got frisky with Ministry's Al Jourgeson in 1995 and flashed her boobs (more than once) and let everyone look up her dress during her shambolic 1999 performance, are not mentioned. That's probably because, as Love says in her author's note, "You will notice the absence of anything much for about four years of my life; that's because I was on drugs and nothing I wrote made any sense." So yes, there isn't much from the mid to late 90s.
Elsewhere, there are photos of her from age 3 in San Francisco through to her less elegant days and on to times when she looks like a true beauty.
Her scribblings provide insights into her songs, her relationship with daughter Frances Bean and husband Kurt Cobain, and how she dealt (or more correctly didn't deal) with his death in 1994.
Put it this way, Love's diaries make a great book for the coffee table.
* Dirty Blonde - The Diaries of Courtney Love is out now through Macmillan ($60)
