Where Did You Sleep Last Night
CBC Books | CBC News | Posted: March 9, 2017 8:07 PM | Last Updated: July 13, 2018
Lynn Crosbie
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. (From House of Anansi)
From the book
"I was writing junk-slowly in the Little Mermaid notebook Evelyn got for me from the Dollar Tree.
She used it to write her own lyrics when she was starting out: we alternated pen colours to keep our words straight.
She wrote in blue about a bird's belly filled with cicadas and music. I wrote in black about a monkey drawing the steel bars of its cage like a staff. We both wrote about ourselves, about power and pain; about chunks of nausea and bliss."
From Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Lynn Crosbie @2015. Published by House of Anansi Press.