He began smoking marijuana at 13, tried heroin six years later and had developed a severe addiction by the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s.
Around that period, he met Love, who had openly acknowledged struggles of her own. After reports about his death surfaced, she seemingly responded by sharing a Feb. 9 Instagram photo of herself reading Flamingo Estate’s The Guide to Becoming Alive.
Often viewed as a grunge-era equivalent of Sid and Nancy—though their story ended differently—Cobain and Love married in 1992. Six months later, they welcomed their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
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“I always knew their relationship was toxic,” Frances Bean told Rolling Stone in 2015, describing the couple’s early connection through drugs. “And I don’t promote having a fix-it baby, which is what I was—to fix their problems…In the sense that their own families were so chaotic, that they wanted to create their own family as soon as possible: ‘If we create our own family, it will be nothing like our families were.'”
Instead, said Frances Bean, now 34 and the mother of son Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk, whom she welcomed with husband Riley Hawk in 2024, “It ended up being a million more times chaotic.”