Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Written by: Crosbie, Lynn

Does true love have supernatural power?

Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.

Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed.

Her mother is an alcoholic grunge relic from Seattle, whose recollections, books and music help ignite Evelyn’s love for Cobain—a love so painfully strong that it summons the deceased singer to her side.

When Evelyn is taken to the hospital after an overdose, she awakens to find Cobain—who has little to no memory of his former life—convalescing in the bed beside her.

Once united, they quickly become addicted to drugs and each other.

Cobain—renamed Celine Black—and Evelyn escape the hospital and run off together, determined to have everything they want. Inevitably, they become infamous musicians, but despite their mutual devotion, the couple is tormented by strong passion and jealousy. As their celebrity grows, their relationship becomes more excessive, and an episode of sexual violence explodes, shockingly, into murder.

A highly original work of haute fan fiction, written in Crosbie’s poetic and emotionally evocative prose, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is an imaginative, surprisingly funny, and touching novel about the adamant persistence of love.

Does true love have supernatural power?

Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a love story about a teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with Kurt Cobain.

Evelyn Gray is a sad and lonely sixteen-year-old from Carnation, Washington who is terrorized by her classmates at school. She spends most of her time in her room reading, writing letters to dead people, listening to old records and talking to the poster of Kurt Cobain above her bed.

Her mother is an alcoholic grunge relic from Seattle, whose recollections, books and music help ignite Evelyn’s love for Cobain—a love so painfully strong that it summons the deceased singer to her side.

When Evelyn is taken to the hospital after an overdose, she awakens to find Cobain—who has little to no memory of his former life—convalescing in the bed beside her.

Once united, they quickly become addicted to drugs and each other.

Cobain—renamed Celine Black—and Evelyn escape the hospital and run off together, determined to have everything they want. Inevitably, they become infamous musicians, but despite their mutual devotion, the couple is tormented by strong passion and jealousy. As their celebrity grows, their relationship becomes more excessive, and an episode of sexual violence explodes, shockingly, into murder.

A highly original work of haute fan fiction, written in Crosbie’s poetic and emotionally evocative prose, Where Did You Sleep Last Night is an imaginative, surprisingly funny, and touching novel about the adamant persistence of love.

Published By House of Anansi Press Inc — May 2, 2015
Specifications 392 pages | 5.25 in x 8 in
Supporting Resources
(select item to download)
Excerpt
Guide
Written By Lynn Crosbie is a cultural critic, author, and poet. She teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto.
Written By
Lynn Crosbie is a cultural critic, author, and poet. She teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto.

Short-listed, Trillium Book Award, 2016

“Lynn Crosbie is what a great writer should be: pissed off, bereft, misunderstood, impolite, funny, and in love with the madness of the world.” —Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night is terrifying and beautiful. It is a thrift store jam packed with once loved, tattered, and gorgeous images. Crosbie is as mad as Rimbaud, as sweet as Keats, and as debauched as Courtney Love. Kurt Cobain would have adored her.” —Heather O’Neill, author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“Lynn Crosbie’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night is a brilliant portrait of romance, rages, passionate reunions, the emptiness of fame and the devastating losses that afflict two doomed rock stars locked in a heart-shaped box. Every sentence is poetry. I predict this book will, like Kurt Cobain, develop its own cult following.” —Jowita Bydlowska, author of Drunk Mom

“The book’s most affecting passages are the ones where Evelyn’s reverence for Celine bumps up against her desire to be a rock star in her own right…the sense of being caught in thrall to a self-destructive genius and trying to match him, note for note and mistake for mistake, is resonant.” —Quill & Quire

“Bold, kaleidoscopic, full of absurd black humour, Lynn Crosbie’s new novel Where Did You Sleep Last Night is quite unlike anything else that’s been published recently...It is pop and avant-garde, full of fireworks and heartbreak.” —The Globe and Mail

“eminently worthy of our attention…restless, funny and artfully crazed” —Macleans

“If you were a teenager in the 1990s, Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Lynn Crosbie is a must read” —London Public Library Blog

“I found myself alternately charmed and gutted… Lynn Crosbie has produced a grunge elegy” —Toronto Star