Frances Bean Cobain has opened up in a new interview with The Independent ahead of a new exhibition being curated by Kurt Cobain’s mother and sister, describing how she’s still trying to process his passing decades on – and why she still references his suicide note to this day.
Having lost her father at just 20 months old, Frances eventually dropped out of school in year 10, a moment that led to some typically teenage lashing out, and precluded some more serious battles with addiction.
“I really reverted into myself and really became obsessed with horror movies and comic books and drawing,” she explains. “I defaced my room, all the walls and doors and ceiling. I defaced it.
“That was kind of me attempting to take back a sense of self, by creating my own environment I could go into every day and feel as though I was like in my own world, because oftentimes for me fantasy has felt more like reality. Escaping into my own head space has been more comforting than having to deal with my reality at times.”
Check out Frances Bean Cobain’s debut song:
Escaping into that space also involved the use of substances, but having opened up about her newfound sobriety earlier this year, she feels that she’s also been able to help others make similar gains.
“The most gratifying thing about making that post was getting messages from people not only saying they understood and related to what I was going through, or they themselves were dealing with it,” she says, “but the most powerful thing was people telling me that via that post and via me expressing that and having the capacity to share that with the world, that that had encouraged them to face their own addiction issues.
“That is super. I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than that, somebody saying, ‘you helped me reclaim my life’,” she adds. “It’s an amazing superpower.
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“It’s given me a sense of empathy and compassion that I would never have had any other way, and it’s one thing to observe that kind of behaviour but it’s another thing to live a similar kind of behaviour because you have a different kind of understanding of what it is that informed other people’s behaviour.
“It’s given me connectivity to people in my life that I didn’t think I would connect to again. It’s given me a sense of empathy I didn’t know I had.”
That sense of empathy, apparently, is what’s lead her to the somewhat morbid practice of referring back to the words ‘peace, love, empathy’, which appeared in Kurt Cobain’s highly-publicised suicide note. Frances claims she uses the words “often, because I want to reclaim the peace, love, empathy thing as something that’s meant for health and for compassion and for true peace, love, and empathy.
“Yeah, the association comes from a super dark place,” she admits. “Referencing that is kind of screwed up but at the same time taking the power back is my way of dealing with it.”
You can read the full interview, and find out more about the new family-lead exhibition, here.
If you or somebody you care for needs help or information about depression, suicide, anxiety, or mental health issues, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.
