Melissa Auf der Maur, "Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A '90s Rock Memoir" (DaCapo, 2026)

Apr 2, 2026

Melissa Auf der Maur, Canadian bassist, photographer, and author who played with Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins, discusses her new '90s rock memoir. She recalls Montreal’s countercultural roots and serendipitous analog moments that launched her career. Conversations cover joining big bands amid grief, reframing Courtney Love, preserving analog creativity, and curating a vast photographic archive.

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INSIGHT

Why She Wrote A 90s Rock Memoir

Melissa frames her memoir as a 25-year look at the 1990s to heal personal wounds and offer cultural commentary about that decade.
She links her bohemian Montreal upbringing and parents' activism to her feminist purpose in joining women-forward bands like Hole.

INSIGHT

Parental Activism Shaped Her Feminist Mission

Her parents' 60s/70s broadcasting and feminist activism shaped her worldview and motivated joining Hole as a feminist act.
She frames joining Hole as continuing her mother's frontline feminism to put women on male-dominated stages.

INSIGHT

How The 90s Counterculture Got Co-Opted

She emphasizes the music industry's long-standing corruption and how the 90s generation's anti-corporate stance was ultimately co-opted by major labels.
The promise of platform and financial stability seduced artists who lacked support, leading many to be 'bought and sold.'

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Melissa Auf der Maur's new memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A '90s Rock Memoir(DaCapo, 2026) is a remarkably open-hearted, clear-eyed memoir of the '90s Alternative era by the bassist of Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins Even the Good Girls Will Cry begins with Auf der Maur's bohemian upbringing in Montreal, where her early, deep connection to art and music gave her entry to the colorful and thriving local creative scene. Working as a cassette DJ and ticket girl, she would see (and sometimes meet) the luminaries who'd pass through town--Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, Pavement, Sonic Youth. Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a long-shot fan letter to a PO Box, her band Tinker scored a life-changing opening slot for The Smashing Pumpkins and, sensing her natural talent on bass, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love, just one of the many uncanny threads that weaves destiny throughout this riveting memoir. Whisked from her local scene and thrust into the eye of a hurricane of grief on a global stage, Melissa joined Hole for the band's 1994 Live Through This world tour just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Hole's prior bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with Courtney Love at the center of it all. It was a tour of passionate intensity, as a chaotic yet stunningly powerful band constantly threatened to spin out of control. Melissa brings the reader with raging intimacy into the action, offering a heroic portrait of the unforgettable Courtney Love as she howled into the darkness as if to keep grief at bay. That was only the beginning of Melissa's journey through alternative rock. Part rock memoir, part travel diary, part psychedelic scrapbook, Even the Good Girls Will Cry is a behind-the-scenes rock 'n' roll memoir with a soulful intimacy and mystic undertone that sets it apart from memoirs by her peers. It is a vivid dispatch from the last analog decade, artistically capturing that bygone era in all its messy, angsty glory.

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