"I felt like an absurd grunge Cinderella, who’d found herself with VIP access to the ball." Melissa Auf der Maur's '90s rock memoir Even The Good Girls Will Cry is frank, fearless and fabulously revelatory

Melissa Auf der Maur is one of the true unsung heroines of '90s alternative rock. Inspired to start her own rock band, Tinker, after seeing Smashing Pumpkins play in the Montreal club where she worked as a ticket girl in 1991, Auf der Maur was invited to join Hole in 1994 after being recommended to "tornado meets philosopher" Courtney Love by Love's former boyfriend Billy Corgan.

Auf der Maur joined Love's band at a time when the Los Angeles quartet were reeling from two devastating tragedies. On April 5, 1994, just one week before Hole were set to release their brilliant major label debut, Live Through This, Love's husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, died by suicide in the family's home in Seattle, aged 27: then, on June 16, '94, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in Seattle, also aged 27.

Auf der Maur's very first gig with her new band - only her seventh gig ever - took place on the afternoon of August 26, 1994, in front of 65,000 music fans, and hundreds of rubbernecking representatives of the world's music press, at Reading festival in England.

Auf der Maur's memories of the day form the introduction to her first memoir, Even The Good Girls Will Cry, billed as “part rock memoir, part travel diary, and part psychedelic scrapbook”. The chapter is aptly titled, 'Through The Looking Glass', with Auf der Maur, then aged 22, all too aware that her life is about to change forever.

"I felt like an absurd grunge Cinderella, who’d found herself with VIP access to the ball," she writes, in the first of many quotable insights scattered throughout the book's 432 pages. The story that unfolds is remarkable for its candour, its insights, its wit and its jaw-dropping revelations. Auf der Maur was reluctant to join Hole - at the time, a band of "grieving drug addicts", as she recalls - but she committed to the secondment, and had a front row seat as the mayhem and madness of the '90s alt. rock scene unfolded.

There are cameo appearances in her book for icons of the era - Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Donatella Versace, Auf de Maur's former boyfriend Dave Grohl, and her 'grunge dad' Billy Corgan among them - but this is very much Auf der Maur's own story, unique, frank and fearless, revisiting and contextualising a decade - the "last analog decade" as she describes it- in which the world changed to an almost unrecognisable extent.

It's a book about family, about community, about the transformative power of music and art, and about the value of holding on to one's humanity, self-respect and common decency in the midst of an often frighteningly chaotic blur of drugs, death and bullshit. The story concludes in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks on the bassist's adopted hometown New York, with our heroine on the brink of turning 30, more than ever feeling lucky to be alive, and determined to make the most of her freedom.

"My world had already been transformed by the power of my own freckled bass-playing hand and my commitment to independence," she writes. "I had helped break my own heart and detached from those who claimed they desired me most in order to be stronger for it. But the world I’d been living in as recently as last night, a music- hungry fantasy in the land of the free, had just changed in an instant by the hand of an unknown enemy.

"With that, the twenty- first century was born."

Bring on volume two.