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Until cultural anthropologists discover the hidden bomb shelter on whose walls Courtney Love has been secretly scrawling a diary in her own blood for the past twenty years, our best shot at truly understanding the troubled rock star's inimitable brand of crazy might be her mother's upcoming memoir. It seems that Love had a pretty typical childhood, if one's idea of "typical" is playing a game of "Let's Feed the Baby Some Acid and Make Her Look Like the Blacklight Poster." From Page Six:

Courtney had a troubled upbringing and her hippie parents split up shortly after her first birthday. When she was 4 years old, her father, Hank, would dose her with "magic pills" and draw psychedelic squiggles all over her naked body. [Mother Linda] Carroll eventually had to take him to court to keep him from having unsupervised visits with Courtney. Elsewhere in the book, Carroll relates:

* Courtney started in therapy when she was 6 years old. She was caught reading porn magazines in an adult bookstore at age 9 and was kicked out of every school she attended.

* She took an early stab at alcoholism at 12. One Christmas Eve, she guzzled wine until she vomited, then ran out into a field and started cutting herself.

* After the Christmas incident, young Courtney was sent to a "treatment center" in Oregon for children with severe behavioral problems, but she kept running away and wrecking the place. "We had to tape her legs together after she kicked in a window," Courtney's caseworker said.

Developmental psychopathology is a very complicated thing, but we're pretty sure one can draw a straight line of causality from those "pills n' squiggles" incidents to that breast-pinching sneak attack of last year. If anything, it's amazing that Love hasn't shown up at the Grammys in a diaper and brandishing a flamethrower. Yet, anyway.