[TW // mentions of mental health issues and drug addiction]
Growing up with cool parents with cool music taste, my introduction to Nirvana came at the early age of three. One of my first memories is standing in my living room watching the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video on our giant box TV just absolutely enthralled. The older I got, the more I began to resonate with the lyrics of Kurt Cobain and his way of thinking. Almost every Christmas, I was blessed with magazines talking about his life, Nirvana CD’s, and posters of him. It’s safe to say I know an unhealthy amount about Kurt Cobain. This book was my first proper biography I had ever read on him. I went into it knowing about the mixed reviews but decided I needed to judge for myself.
This book details Cobain’s life in a startling way. If you have any preconceived notions of who he was and how he operated, this book will most likely tear them to shreds. Heavier Than Heaven, although the name of a tour Nirvana was a part of, can easily be used to describe the soul of Kurt Cobain which is on full display in this biography.
It starts out as any typical biography, detailing his birth, family life, and early childhood in a very efficient yet story-like way; a phrase that can be used to describe how this entire book is executed. A nice touch that I really love is that every chapter is named after a quote from Kurt or someone close to him which seemed to, at least in my case, reel in the reader and connect them straight to Kurt.
Being completely honest, there isn’t much to absolutely love about the book. It’s just a typical biography but it is well documented, and almost everything comes straight from interviews the author held with people close to Cobain, so the facts and extra layers of the story are all there. If you know a lot about Kurt Cobain already you might not find much in this book you haven’t heard before. With that being said, there are many pieces of information inserted that I found to be unnecessary for people to know in order to understand who Kurt was as a person. Some of the unexpected tidbits of personal information led me to put the book down because I was deeply disturbed and felt like I was invading his privacy which, even in his 27 years of death, he still deserves.
The first half of this book talks about his early life leading up to his musical career. I found everything to be very accurate to the point where you knew what he was thinking during those times and if you’ve gone through similar struggles in your adolescence, you’ll be able to relate to him immediately. The second half of the book details the bulk of his musical career and adult life. These are the parts most people know already since he’s become somewhat of a musical icon. With this half of his life came the bad parts of his drug addiction and mental health. While his struggles were a huge part of his life, a catalyst for his writing, and most accounts of his situation can serve as a cautionary tale, I found that the author of this book rushed through certain parts of his musical career and success in order to detail the tribulations of his addiction. Ultimately, the author seemed eager to talk of Kurt’s early demise as he alludes to his death several times throughout the book.
As the book winds down and you get to the final chapters, you realize what the book is going to end on and you dread it. This leads me to the major piece that I disliked about this book which was the last chapter. The author took many creative liberties to detail Kurt’s final moments as if it were a script from a movie. He tries to tell us exactly what Kurt was thinking and how he was planning, which is something no one truly knows except Kurt himself. Through reading multiple positive and negative reviews about this book, I noticed most people felt the exact same way about this. It’s just very off putting and plays into a bigger issue that a lot of people, especially in the media, are guilty of. They often assume they know exactly what a mentally ill person is thinking and why which only furthers the stigmas surrounding mental health.
It did seem as though the author was only paying attention to the negative aspects toward the end of Kurt’s life but in reality, it pinpoints the exact moments where pieces started falling apart and how he was unable to piece them back together. It gets across the point that he was incessantly struggling to stay afloat which is a hard pill for some people to swallow.
All in all, this book is incredibly telling and is a great starting point if you want to get to know and understand Kurt Cobain’s life. Even down to the stuff you’ll wish you didn’t read.