Even the Good Girls Will Cry

A remarkably open-hearted, clear-eyed memoir of the ’90s Alternative era by the bassist of Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Even the Good Girls Will Cry begins with Melissa Auf der Maur’s bohemian upbringing in Montreal, where her early, deep connection to art and music gave her entry to the colorful and thriving local creative scene. Working as a cassette DJ and ticket girl, she would see (and sometimes meet) the luminaries who’d pass through town—Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pavement, Sonic Youth. Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a long-shot fan letter to a PO Box, her band Tinker scored a life-changing opening slot for The Smashing Pumpkins and, sensing her natural talent on bass, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love, just one of the many uncanny threads that weaves destiny throughout this riveting memoir.

Whisked from her local scene and thrust into the eye of a hurricane of grief on a global stage, Melissa joined Hole for the band’s 1994 Live Through This world tour just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Hole’s prior bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with Courtney Love at the center of it all. It was a tour of passionate intensity, as a chaotic yet stunningly powerful band constantly threatened to spin out of control. Melissa brings the reader with raging intimacy into the action, offering a heroic portrait of the unforgettable Courtney Love as she howled into the darkness as if to keep grief at bay.

That was only the beginning of Melissa’s journey through alternative rock. Part rock memoir, part travel diary, part psychedelic scrapbook, Even the Good Girls Will Cry is a behind-the-scenes rock ’n’ roll memoir with a soulful intimacy and mystic undertone that sets it apart from memoirs by her peers. It is a vivid dispatch from the last analog decade, artistically capturing that bygone era in all its messy, angsty glory.

• "Our '90s fever dreams were beautiful but they were also brutal and only the good girls, like Melissa, have the guts to tell you that."
  Shirley Manson, lead vocalist of Garbage
• "An intimate, poetic look of Meliss Auf der Maur’s experience making music before the distractions of social media, when musicians made music not for followers but for themselves, pouring everything they had into the sounds that defined a generation."
  Walton Goggins
• "Fearless, loyal, and radically alive, Melissa Auf der Maur brings the same fire to her writing that she does to her life."
  Natasha Lyonne
• "As if through the lens of her camera, Melissa shows us a female experience of rock and roll where we as women rarely get to sit at the table and share in the spoils."
  Martha Wainwright, musician and author of "Stories I Might Regret Telling You"
• “Even The Good Girls Will Cry is both a portrait of an artist--a real one--and a crucial generational document of what it meant to be a woman in a band (and not just a band: the band). All the things we want from a rock memoir are here in spades--the excitement, the electricity. the drama onstage and off---but Auf der Maur's phenomenal powers of observation, and of self-observation, elevate things to a whole other level. The result is wildly compelling.”
  Matthew Specktor, author of "The Golden Hour," "Always Crashing in the Same Car," and "American Dream Machine"
• "Illuminating. . . . refreshingly pure of heart. . . . a rollicking look at a bygone era."
  Publishers Weekly
• "Auf der Maur is a superb writer, and also a tender one. . . . will appeal to alt-rock fans, yes, but also to anyone who has dealt with loss and redemption. A compassionate memoir that offers much more than '90s nostalgia."
  Kirkus Reviews