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 |
| Keywords | women writers; Kurt Cobain; Nirvana; Grunge; Canadian Writers; Magical Realism; Addiction; Codependency; relationships; Fanfiction; Carnation; Washington; Music; book club; Courtney Love; Infatuation; Heartbreak; First Love; Stream of Consciousness; Romance; Celine Black; Grunge Music; Rock; Grunge Rock; Canadian Literature; Drugs; Friendship; Song Lyrics; Experimental Fiction; Violence; Quirky; Weird; |
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Supporting Resources
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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
“At its heart, this is a beautiful and dead-earnest book about the awfully true desire to bring our long-lost loved ones—including the distant ones that hang on our walls as posters—back to life…Crosbie is one of the boldest and most consistently daring Canadian writers around.” —Torontoist
“Author Lynn Crosbie seems to paint the words on the page…This truly is a wonderful book” —The Bookshelf Blog
“Original and imaginative, filled with wonderfully witty wordplay and plenty of pop culture references… fan fiction for smarty pants.” —THIS Magazine
“The language is darkly poetic, sad yet full of passion” —Winnipeg Free Press
“The intensity of Crosbie's writing will sweep you up – it's manic, sincere, explicit, and hilarious. If you ever had a teenage crush, this is its fever dream equivalent, and it's not to be missed.” —W Dish
“Deliciously bizarre, unapologetically brash, Lynn Crosbie's Where Did You Sleep Last Night is shaping up to be one of the great reads of 2015” —Open Book
“a literary wild ride through the grunge rock scene” —CBC Homerun
“Juxtaposed with Crosbie’s exquisite poetic style and a sense of humour both intelligent and delightfully bizarre, misery is transformed into something beautiful, while still retaining the essential sadness it was born of.” —Rover Arts
“just open to any page and find a paragraph that could stand alone as a devastatingly beautiful poem. This woman can write.” —NOW Magazine
“Crosbie makes this impossibility of reincarnation seem emotionally credible, with her book reading in places like a singular mash-up of fan fiction and magic realism.” —Globe and Mail