Courtney Love / Photographed for SPIN by Daniel Jackson
"Are you on anything?"
Courtney Love pauses suddenly from her simultaneous sewing, smoking, and theorizing about how the only way to be successful by the age of 25 is to forget that you have parents and grills me about the contents of my bloodstream.
It's the week before Christmas and we're sitting at the kitchen counter of the spacious, modern Tribeca loft she's rented from a Russian supermodel for the past three months, currently cluttered with "kook"—the word Love gives to the lacy fabrics and bric-a-brac she dyes or fixes or glues until they look like something belonging to Miss Havisham. Doing so relaxes her, and she is famously difficult to relax.
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I'm not on anything.
"Then why are you shaking?"
Because several windows are open and it's freezing outside, so I feel like Demi Moore at the end of St. Elmo's Fire.
"So you don't take any meds?" she persists. Okay, Ambien, sometimes.
"I thought so," Love says, satisfied. "I can't sleep either. I took Ambien for a few years, but I hated waking up with fucking eggs Benedict on my face and a 1,000-page letter I didn't remember writing. You should switch to Sonata."
And who would know better? When I arrived earlier this evening, Love's first order of business upon stepping out of the shower was to greet her psychopharmacologist, who dropped by unannounced to make sure everyone in the Love-Cobain residence, as it's referred to by the housekeeping service, had what they needed. After consulting her roommate and guitarist, the reedy, handsome, British 23-year-old Micko Larkin, Love dismissed the doctor with a simple "We're good."
During the past decade, sundry cracked-out antics, including an OxyContin OD in front of her daughter, fueled macabre speculation regarding Love's mental state. And just recently, a Los Angeles court awarded guardianship of 17-year-old Frances Bean to Love's late husband Kurt Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor, and sister, Kimberly Dawn Cobain, amid rumors of domestic abuse. Love's coping mechanism is, as ever, pure manic energy, which is not to be confused with productivity.
