Tortured Love

Linda Carroll's unorthodox relationship with her famous mother and infamous daughter forced her to reevaluate love, loss and the control we have over the people we most want to protect.

By Hara Estroff Marano, Kaja Perina, published on July 01, 2006 - last reviewed on May 10, 2007

There is no relationship more emotionally charged than that between mother and child. The gravitational pull defies space, time and logic and persists in the wake of estrangement, rejection and worse. Every human bumps up against these bonds, but few have grappled with them as directly as Linda Carroll, a 62-year-old therapist in Corvallis, Oregon. Carroll, the mother of five children, struggled with her firstborn, the notorious rock singer-songwriter-actress Courtney Love, whose erratic behavior and outsize persona have made headlines for years. Linda emancipated Courtney at age 16, and the two are now estranged. When Courtney had a daughter in 1992, Linda began a search for her own mother, the woman who gave her up at birth. The quest led to Paula Fox, acclaimed writer and a National Book Award winner. In a memoir, Her Mother's Daughter (Doubleday), Carroll chronicles the painful dissolution of her relationship with Courtney and her improbable reunion with Paula. Carroll spoke to Psychology Today about ambiguity in relationships and the myth of closure.

PT: Your book is about your famous daughter and your famous mother. Why?

LC: I wrote a book about me and looking for my roots. I found that the roots were inside me. It's my struggle to understand. My daughter Courtney has struggled with alcohol and drugs and mental illness and celebrity. It is a lethal combination, and she continues to do damage. The question is, how do you go on with your life? How do you mourn the living?

You learned to live with ambiguity. You talk about Courtney and her inconsolability when upset even as an infant.

I took Courtney to a therapist when she was 2. I felt something was wrong. There were times she would cry for hours and couldn't be soothed. Other times she cried in a way that seemed fake, as if she would study people and then do it. The first therapist I consulted said, "I don't know what's wrong. But I have a feeling it's going to get worse, and there's not anything we can do." I have been grateful all my life for him.

For admitting that he doesn't have any answers and he's not going to blame you?

He was an intern; he hadn't yet learned that he knew everything. When she was 14, we went to a therapist who also said she may get worse. All the rest said, "It's you." And I believed that.

You lived a chaotic lifestyle with many moves and several marriages.

Besides Courtney, I have two other daughters by my second husband and two sons by a third husband. The four children are really close. The two girls did a lot of moving back and forth as children, and they are all so worldly. They say it was hard but that it also gave them something. But until Tim [my fourth husband, of 17 years], my selection process in men was bad. People always talk about the negative effect of divorce on kids, but they don't talk about how children might be better off not being raised by a disturbed father. A therapist once said to me, "Your problem is not getting divorced, it's getting married. The fact that you got out is really healthy; you finally got your act together."

In Courtney's childhood, when did you stop blaming yourself for her behavior?

When she was about 8 and I became the brunt of her rage. Something in me shifted then. One time, years later, I was visiting Courtney's daughter, Frances, at their home in Beverly Hills, and Courtney was horribly cruel to the people who worked for her. I felt deep shame and asked myself what I must have done to her for her to do that to them. I went to my own therapist and cried. I was trying to show myself that I'm not responsible for her treating people like that. I know that I'm not making her make those choices and that I didn't make her bipolar. What I did do was give in to her. I was so scared of her anger that I indulged her, and I taught her really young that if she screams, she could get her own way. But I did not make her a seriously character-disordered person.

You have had to deal with heartache as a parent. You've faced existential issues. And then there's the fact that it is all done on a big public stage. Was that an undertone with Courtney growing up, what other people thought?

No. But it started to be when she was in juvenile detention and I was training to become a counselor. On Sundays I would drive with my daughters Nicole and Jaimee to see her in detention, where she'd busted a door and knocked someone's teeth out. She was 15 or 16. That was so mortifying, I didn't talk about it. I was becoming a counselor, my children and I were building a life, and then I have this kid who is in prison.

When did you last speak with Courtney?

About six years ago. She was cleaning up her act, practicing Buddhism. She was dating the actor Edward Norton—she was sort of his project. We had some conversations. She made some generous gifts of money to me and to her half-brothers: paid for a year of their college. But she became enraged when she found out one of her siblings hadn't listened to her new album as soon as it came out. That was the end.

Have you achieved closure in this relationship?

Closure is the worst term in our culture. I don't think there's such a thing as closure. I think of people who have experienced the death of a loved one by murder and are waiting for the murderer to be executed. They say things like, "Well, then there can be closure." Closure is a human fantasy. We live with open wounds. We live with what happens to us, and we do something with it.