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In an article by Steve Appleford of Rolling Stone Magazine, Eric Erlandson talks about “Letters to Kurt”, a prose-poem memoir to Kurt Cobain.

Nearly two decades after the 1994 suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Erlandson looks just as he did at the height of grunge: tall, thin, stringy blond hair to his shoulders. Letters to Kurt is his accounting of that turbulent time, looking back with rage and affection for an era of great creative successes and a crushing wave of heroin and death.

“We were in the middle of that creative energy that was happening,” Erlandson remembers. But at the same time, he tells Rolling Stone, “I was in the abyss. I quite literally had one foot in, one foot out. The one foot out was my anchor, which is my Buddhism. But sometimes I’d feel too clean and I’d want to get dirty. . . . There’s different forms of suicide. When you’re playing around with drugs, it’s a pretty clear suicide death wish.”

He saw the self-destruction and depression up close, not just of Cobain but also in Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died two months after the Nirvana leader. She was Erlandson’s ex-girlfriend and he was the last person to see her before her heroin overdose soon after the release of Hole’s Live Through This.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/eric-erlandson-talks-about-letters-to-kurt-20120408#ixzz1tQyGFato