Kurt Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean, has spoken about her father’s legacy, noting that she’s never been able to bring herself to look through her father’s journals.
Back in November of 2002, a collection of Kurt Cobain’s journals was released to the public. Aptly named Journals, one of the first things that fans are confronted with in the book is a hand-written plea from Cobain that states, “don’t read my diary when I’m gone.”
Despite the collection selling quite well thanks to dedicated Nirvana fans, at least one person has heeded Cobain’s advice and chosen not to read his private thoughts; his own daughter.
Speaking to The Independent, Frances Bean Cobain opened up about her father’s writings, noting that she finds them “too intimate” to read.
“I don’t look through his journals. It feels too intimate,” Cobain began. “I am really regretful that my mom put those out there. I know it was her way of trying to contribute his personal thoughts and I know that people really want to know that.”
“I can’t imagine being dead and having people know my intimate thoughts. What an invasion of privacy, I don’t think it is merited especially since in his art he decided not to put out that thinking. It is a different thing to get to know him through his art, a deliberate public extension of himself.”
“As an artist you sign an unspoken contract putting your art into the custody of everybody else,” she continued. “That’s the deal with being an artist. I really enjoy his art but I find it is a lot harder to connect to his private journals.”
“It feels like an invasion of privacy to me. And I don’t know if he would have wanted people reading all those personal, deep, dark thoughts.”
Frances Bean Cobain also took the opportunity to open up about the 2015 documentary Montage Of Heck, which she admits was different turned out differently to how she hoped it would.
“That movie ended up being not what I wanted it to be,” Cobain explained. “The first half of the movie is really beautiful; the second half, we all ended up hating Kurt. We were all like, ‘You whiny little bitch. What is wrong with you?’ That wasn’t reflective of what we were trying to convey.”
While Kurt’s mother Wendy noted that she regretted the film, Frances Bean only expressed her disappointment at not being able to be more involved due to battling an addiction at the time.
“I regret not being in a headspace to be more involved,” she explained. “I was on a lot of drugs. I was not present. I was not capable of having authentic input.”
Thse comments comes only months after Frances Bean also revealed that she hopes to follow in her father’s footsteps, announcing her plans to release her own music at some point in the near future.
“With regards to music, I don’t want to pigeon hole myself and say I am a musician or a visual artist because I feel like it’s all encompassing and I feel like every bit of my art is related to the other,” she explained to E! back in April.
“So do I want to pursue my music further and see it come to fruition and see something further and see something palpable? Absolutely.”
Check out Nirvana’s ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle’:
