Courtney Love's Trip Back From the Bottom

Oct. 31, 2006 — -- Ambition, addiction, and publicly embarrassing antics.

Everything about singer-actress Courtney Love seems larger than life.

The widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain doesn't just invite the world in, she gives the public a front-row seat.

Love's recently released memoir, "Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love," provides readers with an intimate look at her life through photos, scribbled notes, and lyrics and diary entries.

She writes candidly about her past, her drug and alcohol problems, Cobain, and their daughter, Frances Bean, who is now 14 years old.

Now sober for 15 months, Love writes that if she could, she'd put "a black page in this book and just write 2001 to 2004 across it," because "I was on drugs and nothing I wrote made any sense."

Love, 42, has lived what she calls a "wild pirate life." She's attended reform schools, lived in foster homes, and performed in strip clubs.

From the time she was a young girl, Love had her eye on fame. Some of her dreams of stardom were dashed, some were realized, but it all came at a price.

Love said she once applied to become a Mouseketeer. Her hopes may have been dashed at her audition, Love said today on "Good Morning America," when she read a poem by troubled poet Sylvia Plath.

Love catapulted onto the world stage in the early 1990s on the arm of the legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Not only was she a rock star's wife, she was also a rock star in her own right, fronting the band Hole. Both also battled drug addiction.

Their unconventional love story was cut short on April 8, 1994, when Cobain was found dead in his Seattle estate. When Love spoke about her husband's suicide with ABC's Barbara Walters in 1995, she was remarkably candid.

When Walters asked, "Could you have stopped him permanently?" Love said, "No. But I could have been diligent."

Cobain's death, Love said, sent her on a downward spiral of drug addiction that brought her to the brink of bankruptcy. Her dependency on drugs turned her from a swan into a skeleton, and she temporarily lost custody of Frances Bean.