Four long years ago, America’s foremost person you wish you hadn’t bummed a cigarette to, Courtney Love, announced that she planned to at last put her version of her life story into a book, so that scholars may one day be able to pull that leather-bound volume from their shelves as they’re being expelled from scholar school. But somehow, assembling Love’s thoughts into a linear narrative proved more difficult than any robot who just achieved sentience and has not yet learned what we humans call “Courtney Love” might have imagined. And after years of waiting, and what probably felt like eons of phone conversations, Love is now being sued by her biographer, Anthony Bozza, for delaying the chronicles of her misbehavior by behaving like Courtney Love.
TMZ reports that Bozza has filed a breach of contract suit against Love, asking for the $200,000 plus interest he’s owed from the original publishing advance they were given by HarperCollins in 2010. The New York Times elaborates that their deal, from which has Love has already taken her own $400,000 advance, also guaranteed Bozza a cut of sales from the book—a book that has repeatedly failed to materialize, because Love has “refused to deliver the manuscript.” Bozza says he turned in a 123,375-word draft last January, but Love swiftly rejected it. “It’s like me jacked on coffee and sugar in a really bad mood. I said keep your bloody money. I’d rather keep my friends,” Love told the Telegraph in 2014, of what was her first exposure to what she sounds like.
For his part, Bozza’s lawsuit says, “Love’s frequent unexplained absences meant that she did not make herself reasonably available to Bozza for months at a time,” contributing to the delays, as well as the realization that he was working with Courtney Love.
Since then, Bozza—who’s made a career of wrangling messy lives into memoirs with the likes of Slash, Tracy Morgan, and Artie Lange—has said Love’s book is just waiting “in the anteroom,” and deemed it “possibly the greatest thing I’ll ever do with anybody.” He also says that Love never formally fired him, and in fact texted him last year to let him know she was working on “trying to fix the book” with an unspecified new author, though she also deemed that author “worthless.” Last August, she echoed those sentiments in an interview with Paper, saying, “It’s a disaster. It’s a nightmare.” Either would make a good title if and when it ever comes out.