I am a little worried about Frances Bean Cobain. I recognize that this is absurd. I don't know her. I'm really only going on her Twitter feed as evidence (and to be fair, having "LeVar Burton Lives Under My Bed" is exactly what I would have thought was super-clever at her age"). But I worry when I see a kid her age writing in a very public forum: "mother, you're a bitch. ALRIGHT LADIES lets move for the 8th time in two years.whoopde-fuckin-doo."
I'm young enough that there are very few celebrities, or pseudo-celebrities I've watched grow up, and as a result, very few candidates for me to feel abstractly maternal about. Frances is one of them. I feel vaguely like a distant aunt to her: her mother and father were the rock stars my older and cooler cousin Eliza introduced me to, my first blast of angry and complicated, the first popular music I listened to after wearing out the tape on my Beach Boys and Beatles cassettes on what I remember to be a very finicky Walkman. Like any child whose parents die or become what seems to be irretrievably broken, I wanted her to not simply survive but to thrive, so she can keep alive and growing what was beautiful in them.
That's entirely unfair to her, unfairly judgmental to her mother (whose music I do admire, tremendously, and I wish there was more of it). Frances Cobain should have whatever kind of life she wants, independent of her parentage, and with the right to try on and abandon teenage nonsense as she sees fit, and without said nonsense following her around forever. That's not something I, or anyone biologically related to her, could guarantee for her at this point. But I suppose I can wish it for her, and maybe that's not such an embarrassing thing to want.