Nineteen ninety-four is the year this memoir turns on. Melissa Auf der Maur reads thirteen hours and twenty-nine minutes of her own life into this audiobook, and its center of gravity is the point where a bass player out of Montreal joins Hole for the Live Through This world tour, just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and the band's previous bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with Courtney Love newly widowed in the middle of it. Everything before that is how she got there. Everything after is what it cost her and how she eventually walked away from the whole thing.
Contingency, Not Destiny, Got Her There
Getting to that point makes a better story than most rock memoirs manage, because the luck is so specific. A bohemian upbringing in Montreal, an early attachment to art and music, work as a cassette DJ and a ticket girl, and a local scene good enough that Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, Pavement and Sonic Youth all came through it. Then a thrown beer bottle and a long-shot fan letter to a P.O. box, which between them won her band Tinker an opening slot for The Smashing Pumpkins, and Billy Corgan recommending her to Courtney Love off the strength of what he heard. Destiny is the word the copy reaches for. Contingency is closer.
Defending Courtney Love is the book's argument, and the copy does not hide it. What the description promises is a long overdue, full-throated defense of a woman who was, at the moment Auf der Maur joined the band, the most publicly reviled figure in American music and had just been widowed. Writing that defense from inside the tour, as the person standing next to her every night while a chaotic and powerful band threatened to come apart, gives it a standing nothing written from outside could have. Whether it convinces you is a separate question, and one this book is entitled to raise.
A Tribute to Four, and a Bid for One
Something the one written response gets right is that the memoir is doubly aimed. Filed in March 2026 by a Hole fan who admits to knowing the bassist only as an image, the tall figure quietly holding down the low end, it reads the book as a tribute to four outsized people: Love and Corgan, and her own parents, the academic Linda Garboureau and the journalist and city politician Nick Auf der Maur. And then it notices the second thing, that the tribute is also a bid for the middle of her own story, told in her own terms, against four very large shadows.
Ending is what the book does that other memoirs of this era refuse. The copy is explicit about the post-9/11 collapse of the grunge world, a shift almost overnight to something less communal and more aggro-bro, a darkening it describes as still going on. And it is explicit about her own exit: still in demand, still capable, and choosing a different life anyway. Part rock memoir, part travel diary, part psychedelic scrapbook is how the description files it, and that third label is the one that suggests the book knows it is describing a scrapbook rather than a career.
Listening to Her Own Grief Takes Stamina
Auf der Maur reads her own book, which changes the terms of two chapters in particular. A defense of a living friend and a description of somebody else's grief both land differently when the voice belongs to somebody who was standing in the room, and the writing is going to be tested by that proximity more than by any question of technique. The assignment is stamina as much as anything: a full working day of first-person material, much of it about people she still knows. Sample a passage about the 1994 tour and not the Montreal chapters, since the early material is the easy part to read aloud.
Fifty Photographs This Edition Cannot Give
Fifty photographs are the thing this edition cannot give you. The copy makes a real selling point of them, more than fifty never-before-seen images taken by the author, who catalogued the era as a working photographer, and the phrase used is that they complement the narrative. Nothing on this record mentions an accompanying PDF. A listener is therefore buying a book that advertises half of itself as visual and delivers none of it. The description on the page does not help either, since it stops in the middle of the sentence that was supposed to describe what kind of memoir this is.
Recency accounts for the number above the reviews, and nothing else does. A March 2026 release has had months, not years, to accumulate a public verdict, and exactly one person has registered one. A whole-star click at the top of the scale breaks no arithmetic rule, so treat the 5.0 as an absence of evidence wearing the costume of a consensus. It also cannot tell you what was being graded, since a single click distinguishes nothing between the writing, the reading, the price and the fact that the file downloaded correctly.
Without the Era, the Names Won't Carry You
Anybody who lived through the alternative decade and has been waiting for somebody at the center to write honestly about it will want this. So will readers of Love and Corgan biographies who have only ever met the bassist as a name in a lineup. The Montreal material makes it worth more than a tour diary, since the book is genuinely about how a provincial scene manufactures a person capable of walking into a global one. Listeners who care about the photographic record of the period should buy the print edition and use this as a companion.
Without an interest in the era, the names will not carry you. A run of famous names arrives as encounters, and an encounter is only interesting when you already care who the person was. Anyone hoping for a musician's technical memoir, the gear and the writing and the studio, should look elsewhere, because this is a book about proximity to fame and grief. Waiting is the sensible move for anyone who wants a settled critical verdict before committing thirteen hours, since this page has almost nothing to offer yet.
The Short Version
- Read by: The author reads her own account, and the risk is a memoir about people she still knows losing its footing across the full runtime
- At its heart: The alternative 1990s, grief on tour, a defense of Courtney Love, leaving music behind
- Vibe: Intimate, loud and elegiac
- Short version: The insider memoir of that decade most worth hearing, though the audio edition loses the fifty photographs the copy sells hardest.
Questions Listeners Ask
Does this audiobook include the photographs the description advertises?
Nothing on the record says so. The copy promises more than fifty previously unseen images by the author, who worked as a photographer through the period, and no accompanying PDF is listed anywhere. Anyone buying primarily for the visual record should choose the printed edition instead.
Is the audiobook read by Melissa Auf der Maur herself?
Yes. Author and reader are one person here, so the account comes with nobody standing between you and it. It matters most across the tour chapters, where the grief being described belonged to colleagues she was working alongside every night.
How much of it is about Hole and Courtney Love?
A large share, and the defense of Love is the book's central argument. The Montreal chapters come first and the later material covers her exit from music, but the tour that followed Kurt Cobain's death is what the memoir is organized around.
