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The book's inclusion of fashion designers Gianni Versace and Marc Jacobs - a picture and remembrance of the former and a personal note from the latter - is almost touching in its aspirational, please-make-me-over appeal. It may be a trick of the eye, but in the slickest photos one looks for the slipped nipple, the reddish blemish, the mascara clump (and, yes, they are all here). And she can't quite shake that aura no matter how high her heels or how fancy her borrowed designer gowns.Įven when she tries hardest to be glamorous and ladylike, there is something askew. She's the real deal: a grungy girl punk rock star. She comes from an era when women played their own instruments and wrote their own songs, but she's not one of those Jewel-ish whiners or Sheryl Crow lite rockers. She is not from the starlet factory where they mint Jojos and Rhiannas and other girls who can do that sweet-yet-sexy-yet-a-little-tough thing. As they say in the South, she's a hot mess. Yet it is undeniably a reflection of Love's psyche, confirming that Love's allure lies in her glorious disarray. This is a pastiche, an assemblage, the most Barthian of texts. Love is adamant in her author's note about the fact that she "really hasn't written a book." She will find no argument here. Instead, she has held on even tighter, trying ever harder to prove her worth through her music, her film roles and now her book. And then there are the lingering doubts that she earned that fame at all, having been married to a man more successful than she was, and having refused to fade away graciously after his death. Love also commits what amounts to a mortal sin by overestimating her own beauty, talent and achievements, believing utterly in herself in a culture where women's self-esteem is undermined at every turn. But feminists are reluctant to champion her, as her choices have often been embarrassing - or worse - from playing Larry Flynt's wife in a controversial film to allegedly using drugs while pregnant with her daughter. There are several reasons Love is a touchstone: She calls herself a feminist when it is a label many women, famous or otherwise, do not wear proudly. Why we should care about Love's private thoughts given her blatant lust for publicity is the more pressing question that her book raises. This is not to list her on the silly A-through-D high-school popularity scale that the proliferation of magazines and television shows devoted to the worship of fame have made the lingua franca, but to consider why Love provokes such a strong reaction. The release of "Dirty Blonde" is an occasion to assess, after an absence - she's not coy about where she's been it's rehab, no Mariah-style "exhaustion" euphemisms for her - where Love belongs on the topography of celebrity now. It's actually closer to a yearbook for a school with only one graduate or maybe Love, albeit in the coolest, most punk-rock way, has succumbed to that most Martha Stewart of pastimes: scrapbooking. Calling the book a diary is a ploy to prey on the desire for access to Love's private thoughts. Open "Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love" to almost any glossy page and you will see a picture of Love, or some simulacrum of her: a smear of lipstick, a doodled self-portrait, a poem, ephemera of her band, Hole, scrawled lyrics, a Polaroid, an artifact of her very productive and self-absorbed imagination.