The Sound and the Fury of Melissa Auf Der Maur

In her new memoir, the Canadian bass legend exorcizes and extols a life well-lived.

By Khagan Aslanov

Published on March 16, 2026

In 1991, in Montreal, when she was 19 years old, Melissa Auf Der Maur had a dream about the power of sound. In the dream, that power arrived as a gift from an alien race, deposited into a pyramid in the desert. It told her that music was the way she would connect with and speak to humanity. Soon afterwards, she picked up the bass guitar, formed her first band, Tinker, and started charting a path that would soon lead her into the midst of one of the most infamous bands and tours in music history. But it had all started with that dream. A dream that was scored by, among others, desert rock pioneers Kyuss, whose members included a then-green, already-virtuosic guitarist, called Josh Homme.

“I was obsessed with Kyuss before I even played music. By the time I was on a global scale, I had actually met all these bands. I ended up meeting Josh Homme when he was in the Screaming Trees, and we were playing bills together. He thought I was a maniac when I ran up to him at a Dutch music festival and told him about the dream. Then, by the time I was writing my (first solo) record, ten years later, I called him and asked if he wanted to write a song about that dream together. And we wrote “I Need I Want I Will,” the closing track of Auf Der Maur,” she says, chuckling, her voice laden with memory.

This sequence, along with a plethora of other dizzying story-lines form Auf Der Maur’s memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry, a scorching account of her life – from her childhood in Montreal, art school and DIY roots, to touring with alt rock colossi Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, to a multi-media solo career, to motherhood and the present.

By any account, it has been a rich, complete and endlessly complex life. On Auf Der Maur’s part, it all feels like a titanic exhale, an attempt to climb out from under the shadow of monoliths.

In fact, perhaps the most singular aspect of Even the Good Girls Will Cry is its fervently empathetic and combative engagement with all that has gone on. This is not an anemic, anesthetized retelling of a ‘blessed’ life, an artist performing a victory lap, name-dropping and sharing some wild road stories – instead, to some degree, Auf Der Maur is here to air long-standing grievances, and call out the whole of society on one of the most reviled collective gaslighting campaigns of modern history.

All this is to say that Courtney Love looms heavily over the book. She has no choice but to. Kurt Cobain had died in the spring of 1994. Auf Der Maur joined Hole in the summer of that year, just as the global tour of Hole’s remarkable breakout, Live Through This, was truly kicking off. What happened over the course of that tour and the ensuing five years was a nauseating display of patriarchal blacklisting and toxic group think. And what Auf Der Maur witnessed, from a frontline view, amounted to a ritualist killing of the career and spirit of one of the most vital and blinding talents of the era.

“My commitment to reframing the most misunderstood medusa hero is a huge part of my book. What I witnessed the world do to a widowed, abandoned single mother, with mental and addiction problems was inhumane. And the fact that when you google ‘Courtney Love,’ one of the first things that still comes up is ‘killed Kurt.’ Do you know how fucking demented and evil that is? The raging misogyny of the planet Earth is what I saw,” Auf Der Maur says, her voice tensing. “One of the most progressive, pioneering powerhouse women. And she still hasn’t had her due.”

It’s a well-trod proceeding that still plays out ad nauseam all over the world, one that gets pettier and pettier as time and perception move along – Love was a major talent and force of nature, as fearless as she was unapologetic, and so, as a female, she was bulldozed over, branded as difficult and incompetent, reduced to stereotypes and endlessly reviled. And with the death of Cobain, the perceived golden child of the era, the world got the perfect catalyst to try and erase her from history.

“I was also enamoured with Nevermind. Hearing an advance copy of it was like a parting of the clouds. I knew it was going to change us,” Auf Der Maur adds, to lend some perspective to it all.

Yet, it’s a thin reconciliation. After all, the other recurring and equally infuriating claim that still persists today is that Cobain was the one who wrote all Hole’s best songs. Here, Auf Der Maur offers a sobering view, as someone who was both a fan of both bands, and who actually played those songs night after night.

“I learned all of Live Through This on a plane ride to Seattle, to join the band. Those songs are so simple – one chord, one riff sometimes, or three chords, two riffs. Loud, soft, loud, soft. You don’t need help with it. The true power of Hole is Courtney Love and her lyrics,” she says. “He would sooner take inspiration from her and her writing. In fact, the lyrics of In Utero were so much more profound because they sounded like hers.”

Time has been somewhat of a redeemer to everything that was done to Love. And there are rumours swirling around that she’s about to launch a new music project. But there’s little that can make up for everything that already happened, for the halcyon time lost. As for the perpetually disgruntled Nirvana fans, still plugging the same chauvinistic routine, Auf Der Maur’s response is as terse as it is exacting:

“I think it’s fucking pathetic.”

From there, Auf Der Maur went on to tour with another 90’s pillar, the Smashing Pumpkins, and then launched a prodigious solo career, that began with her Homme-aided self-titled record in 2004, and which culminated in 2010’s Out of Our Minds, a monumental work that resulted in a spectacular multidisciplinary project, consisting of a studio album, a short film and a comic book.

This is the other major inequity that courses through Auf Der Maur’s timeline. In the wake of her stint with Hole, Auf Der Maur’s own work has always felt somewhat dwarfed, and hardly got the attention it deserved. The vision and scope that she reached for on Out of Our Minds was something to behold – a vertiginous rumination on mythology, internalized agonies and environmentalism, it was made using sustainable methods and possesses incredible aesthetic coordination, to say nothing of how crazily good the music itself (and which includes a shattering duet with Glenn Danzig, a dedication to her father).

There’s more, of course, much more. An article can hardly do justice to the totality of Auf Der Maur’s life and experience, especially because she does such an eloquent job of it in the book itself. Suffice to say, Even the Good Girls Will Cry is more than mere memoir, but something bigger and more discerning, an ingenious mapping of a humanistic journey, both a vivid celebration and a shattering lament.