Hidden in the last few pages of Heavier Than Heaven, Charles R. Cross' biography of Kurt Cobain, is the opportunity to stumble onto the perfect typo. Like all things Cobain, even this morsel of a mistake is charged with meaning and becomes a ridiculously perfect sliver of his ridiculously symbolic life.

In the epilogue entitled "A Leonard Cohen Afterworld," Cross describes Courtney Love's most private moment in the funeral home: "Then she pulled his pants down and cut a small lock of his public hair--his beloved pubes, the hair he had waited so long for as an adolescent, somehow these needed to be preserved." Whether the mistake belongs to Cross, or one of his myriad editors, the typo was impossible to catch simply because it doesn't read as an error: of course Cobain had public hair instead of pubic hair by the end of his life.

The very structure of the error (from private pubic to open public; from small pubic to large public) is the perfect symbol for this biography. Heavier Than Heaven is the unveiling and sanctioning of the most intimate details of Cobain's experience, possibly those last few details never before blasted by the light of day. Cross had the deepest access to Cobain's journals, family photos, medical records, and unreleased Nirvana music, and the book is an amplified litany of these minute details.

It seems important when reading a bio-graphy to consider the biographer's own biography, to try to recognize how the subject and author are related, whether they match up in any meaningful way. Do Charles Cross, former publisher and editor of The Rocket, and Kurt Cobain make a proper pair? The book's dust jacket text suggests that Cross's tenure at The Rocket offers a natural link between himself and Cobain--but anyone who was reading The Rocket then knows how unlikely that is. Cross was never Nirvana's champion: He didn't write any of the paper's early features on the band, and there is no sign among those old Rockets that he, rather than staffers Nils Bernstein or Gillian Gaar, was particularly into Nirvana. He does, however, qualify as a biographer for a different reason: He is the very opposite of Cobain.

Charles R. Cross' essence, which comes across very clearly in this text, is antithetical to Cobain's. Cross is such an ordinary fellow throughout the book that he heightens Cobain's extraordinary mannerisms, beliefs, life, and death. Cobain was a charismatic storyteller; Cross' book is an adamant allegiance to facts, and he calls Cobain out repeatedly for being a mythmaker of his own life. The truth is the facts for Cross; for Cobain, the truth was clearly the fiction.

In this way, Cross comes off as someone sent in to repair and resolve the irregularities of a murky past: Kurt never told the truth about his life, and so Cross is here to do so. And although Cross admits in his author's note that Kurt was intensely private, never admitting the irony, he says his intent "was to honor Kurt Cobain by telling the story of his life." Neither is Cross the writer Cobain surely was. Next to Cross' numb writing, Cobain's journal entries seem alive and generous.

And this is how I ended up liking the book. Even as Kurt Cobain's story is burdened with blockish journalism, this city, the associations (most Seattle residents will personally know someone quoted in this book), the endless fans, the portent, the disappearing portent, there is something that remains oblivious to it all.

After this book, Cobain's allegory is less intact--he's not really that terrible teenage Judas/Jesus fellow. Gratefully, in this accident of a book, there is something gained with the receding allegory, the vacant voice of Cross and the tower of details he built. Cobain's smaller life, the real one, is proven to be both more uncomfortable and far less than allegory, and so a peace resonates off the book. Cobain's shame, his ability to be an asshole, his pet turtles, his real relationship to and views of homosexuality, the prismatic nuances of his narcissism, are all great and surprisingly new stories. And even though there's little wonder now how it all happened, there is still something that moves me.