Mary Forsberg Weiland is the maybe-soon-to-be-ex-wife of Scott Weiland, lead singer of the ’90s grunge-lite band Stone Temple Pilots and, later, the heavy metal co-op Velvet Revolver. He is also known for his many, many trips to rehab and encounters with the law, some of which involved his admittedly codependent wife.
Forsberg Weiland’s backstory is textbook: She grew up poor, parents divorced when she was young, family history of addiction and metal illness. She began drinking as a child, gravitating toward “the bottle of codeine-based grape-flavored cough syrup in the cupboard above the refrigerator.” She dropped out of high school, became a teenage model, befriended a young Charlize Theron (who would soon come to keep her distance), George Hamilton’s son Ashley, and the girl who would become Nicolas Cage’s first wife.
Mary meets Scott pre-fame; he is the driver for her agency, and she is his client. Mary is 16, he is 23. She falls for him instantly. Years go by with sporadic contact. Newly famous, he will call for her to come visit him on the road. She hears he is still involved, he disappears, reappears, they hook up, she hears he is married. Much later, he unexpectedly calls from New York — he is getting divorced. Will she get on a plane now and come meet him? He’ll be on Letterman that night.
“I would like to report that I was outraged, or that I told him in no uncertain terms that I never wanted to see him again,” she writes. They embark on a passionate affair saturated in booze and cocaine (a framed photo of Keith Richards is their favorite coke tray), before Scott graduates to heroin.
Though the two of them — not yet divorced at the time of the book’s publication, despite being on their third filing — are both mentally unstable hardcore addicts, what fascinates is Mary’s inability to see that her true addiction is Scott. More harrowing than any of their drug-fueled fights — including the one in which Mary sets fire to Scott’s clothes — are the pathetic depictions of Mary giving birth. The first time she is in the hospital, Scott shows up late with a masseuse — for him. He lights incense, stretches out on the table and indulges beside his agonized wife until the nurse kicks him out. “Our friends slowly backed out of the room with looks of stunned disbelief on their faces,” she writes. The second time, he strolls in late, missing his daughter’s entry into the world. It’s unclear whether he was recording or using, but Mary doesn’t mind all that much.
Meanwhile, Mary’s untreated bipolar disorder is manifesting in lost weekends, booze, drugs and shopping binges (she admits they burned through millions). The more she unravels, the more tightly she clings to a marriage she knows isn’t working. But Mary enjoys the notoriety, which meshes nicely with her inflated sense of self (a common side effect of addiction — the self is all that matters). When her estranged husband accuses her of cheating on the Howard Stern Show in 2008, she is perversely gratified: “Evidently with the presidential election safely resolved, it was time for the Scott and Mary show again.”
It’s exactly this kind of deranged self-absorption and destruction that makes “Fall to Pieces” a worthy addition to the rock canon. The book could have benefited from a more rigorous edit — it does go on a bit, and God knows drug addicts can be a bore — but then again, rock ’n’ roll is all about excess.
Fall to Pieces
A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and Mental Illness
By Mary Forsberg Weiland with Larkin Warren
HarperEntertainment