LOVE, MOMMY

The family that flings dirt together, stays together. Having watched her daughter not just wash her dirty laundry in public, but invite all and sundry back to hers for a rummage through the laundry bin as well, Courtney Love's Mum, Linda Carroll has decided to muscle in on the action ("tell her side of the story.")

Carroll hardly surprises - even the claim that her dad "used to dose his young daughter with "magic pills" and draw psychedelic designs all over her naked four-year-old body" doesn't really make the jaw drop in the way it would if it was reported as happening to, say, Ashley Olsen. The story, although lurid, is mostly sad: drinking too soon, puking too soon, unhappy and uncontainable at school, or at special educational centres; onto drugs - it's a tale of a kid put on the edge of a horrifying precipice, and then given a bit of a shove.

Lurid though it might be, the concept is actually pretty sympathetic to Love - that after all she's tried to cope with for so long, it's perhaps to her credit that she's only got an on-off drug problem and the odd bit of bottle-related violence going on - but Courtney doesn't see it like that:

The singer-actress released a statement through her spokesman, Peter Asher, saying that she finds it "astonishing, and profoundly depressing, that any mother would write a book containing numerous allegations about her own young daughter."

... although since Carroll washed her hands of Love when she was seven, perhaps not very astonishing. Courtney hasn't read the book yet, mind, and perhaps the title - Her Mother's Daughter - suggests the book is supposed to try and shoulder responsibility rather than just offer blame.

And make a few quid, of course.

music linda carroll courtney love