Courtney Love and Francis Bean: an unhelpful Twitter family feud

What's Love got to do with it? In just one more way to air the family dirty laundry,  a Twitter family feud now sees Courtney Love apologizing to her daughter Frances Bean in tweets. But the path to reconciliation cannot be found in 140 characters.

|
Diane Bondareff/AP
Courtney Love, controversial rocker and wife of the late Kurt Cobain, accused Foo Fighters front man David Grohl of hitting on Love's 19-year-old estranged daughter Frances Bean, via Twitter. Bean fired back that her mother should be banned from the social networking site.

I remember being 19. I was a newly minted freshman in college far, far away from home. My mother, who had not so secretly expressed her desire that I go to a school several thousand miles closer to home, and I fought a lot. We fought over the phone, and we fought in person when my parents came to campus for visitor’s weekend.  Mothers and teenage daughters have been fighting for generations. But the strange and estranged relationship between perennial tabloid fodder Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain, the 19-year daughter of Ms. Love and the late Kurt Cobain, has set new standards in the absurdity department.

Ms. Cobain lives with her maternal grandmother after filing a restraining order against Love in 2009, an indication of the already strained relationship between the Hole grunge rocker queen and her only child. But the familial squabbling reached a new level of public low when Love took to Twitter to accuse Foo Fighters front man David Grohl, 43, of trying to seduce Ms. Cobain, the daughter of his former best friend and band mate, Mr. Cobain. The string of tweets from Love’s private account was  then captured by gossip site Gawker.

While Mr. Grohl, who has two daughters and a wife of nine years, has yet to comment on the Twitter fracas, Ms. Cobain was furious, telling Lifeline Live, “'While I'm generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn.” She added that she thought Twitter should ban her mother. In return, an apologetic Love retuned to the Internet to offer an apology tweet to her apoplectic offspring, which read, according to Entertainment Weekly, “Bean, sorry I believed the gossip... Mommy loves you.”

My mother is not a rocker, although she does play a mean Irish fiddle, and has absolutely no interest in a personal Twitter account. But I can certainly sympathize with the frustrations of Ms. Cobain. And as I grew older, and up, I came to realize that our fights – over how to dress, and where to go to church, and how often to call home – were trivial in light of how much she loved me, and I her. The anger and resentment that tainted our relationship in those first years after I first left home dissipated with time, but more importantly, because we kept the lines of communication open. We certainly did not air accusations of a highly personal and controversial nature in a public forum. We did not engage in debates via bullhorn on the campus quad, for example.

Courtney Love is a mother struggling with many inner demons, this has been clear for some time. She does seem to love her daughter, but reaching out via Twitter is not the right way to start a conversation. I can’t really think of a more counterproductive, or inappropriate way, actually. For a family touched by tremendous fame and tremendous tragedy, and one that has lived so long in the spotlight, the path to reconciliation will not be found in 140 characters or less.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Courtney Love and Francis Bean: an unhelpful Twitter family feud
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2012/0417/Courtney-Love-and-Francis-Bean-an-unhelpful-Twitter-family-feud
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe