Dirty Blonde is a book containing the diaries of Courtney Love - founder of the band Hole and more famously the wife of the late Kurt Cobain. She is also a model and actress.

I haven't managed to make my way through the whole book in one go. I find it more of a coffee table book. It's nice to browse through, but it's not a coherent story. I was hoping it would be like Nikki Sixx's autobiography 'The Heroin Diaries' which has his diary snippets accompanied by explanations so it feels like a proper book. Anyway, this isn't a review of that book so back to Dirty Blonde.

I don't know a whole lot about Courtney Love. I am a huge Nirvana fan and that is probably the only reason I have actually heard of her. I have listened to a bit of her band, Hole, but they're not one of my favourite bands. She's the ultimate rock star, having lived a life of excess and paid the price for it. She's like a trashier Debbie Harry and I love her style. This book reflects all of those things, but without the in-depth information behind it.

Dirty Blonde is visually stunning. It's got a scrapbook feel and there are pretty pictures and ornate paper everywhere. Unfortunately, a huge amount of the writing is illegible and it takes me a while to get the gist of each diary entry - there are a lot of pictures that I don't understand the relevance, but they are still nice to look at. It gives a very frenzied feel, which I guess represents Courtney's life.

For me, what else is lacking is the lack of emotion regarding Kurt's death. I wanted to get choked up and really see what she was going through, but there was only a double paged spread with very little substance - I guess at the time she wasn't too concerned with writing her diary. I did enjoy the family photos with Frances Bean (the couple's daughter) and Kurt - really emotional when you know the tragedy that breaks up this seemingly happy family. If you are a big fan of Hole, you get to see posters from their very early shows and what appear to be Courtney's first drafts for many of their songs, but without annotations and labels for any of the pieces of paper it's hard to tell what they are - there's a lot of guesswork involved!

I have the hardback version, but they also make a paperback version - I would not recommend buying this because, as I've mentioned before, it's not really a story you would read from cover to cover. The paperback would not do the visuals justice.

Overall, I think this book is beautiful, but there needs to be titles and paragraphs written in the current day explaining what is going on on each page. I'm glad I own it because I love looking through it, but I didn't get the biography I was looking for. It's an insight, definitely, but not a biography. After seeing what an interesting life she has lead, I may buy a biography of hers called "Courtney Love: The Real Story" by Poppy Z Brite which may shed some light on the scrapbook that is Dirty Blonde.