WWW- COURTNEY Love’s mother has written a memoir shedding light on her dunderheaded daughter’s inability to stay sober and keep out of trouble.

In “Her Mother’s Daughter,” due from Doubleday in January, Linda Carroll reveals that Love has been getting stoned and causing calamities since she was in diapers.

Courtney had a troubled upbringing and her hippie parents split up shortly after her first birthday. When she was 4 years old, her father, Hank, would dose her with “magic pills” and draw psychedelic squiggles all over her naked body. Carroll eventually had to take him to court to keep him from having unsupervised visits with Courtney.

Elsewhere in the book, Carroll relates:

* Courtney started in therapy when she was 6 years old. She was caught reading porn magazines in an adult bookstore at age 9 and was kicked out of every school she attended.

* She took an early stab at alcoholism at 12. One Christmas Eve, she guzzled wine until she vomited, then ran out into a field and started cutting herself.

* After the Christmas incident, young Courtney was sent to a “treatment center” in Oregon for children with severe behavioral problems, but she kept running away and wrecking the place. “We had to tape her legs together after she kicked in a window,” Courtney’s caseworker said.

* After another escape where she ended up on the street and getting into hard drugs, she was sent to a youth correctional facility and stayed there until she turned 16. “Violent mood swings, troubles with attachment, terrible dreams, and a sense of persecution had plagued her all her life,” Carroll notes.

* After starting work as a stripper, actress and musician, she “seemed as driven by the impulse to destroy herself as she was to be a star,” Carroll writes.

* On the day in 1994 when Kurt Cobain killed himself, Courtney called and left her mother a message, wailing, “My prince is dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.” Dead also in Carroll’s reckoning was Courtney’s last chance at leading a more normal life.

Meanwhile, Love’s nutty behavior continues. “I’m a bigger badass than 50 Cent – and the only gun I’ve ever held was the one my husband shot himself with,” she recently blabbed to Spin. At least she has vowed to never again to bare her breasts in public.

“I’m 41, I can’t show my t – – s onstage anymore,” she tells the mag. “Me on David Letterman’s desk? That was the last t – – – y you get. The guy at Wendy’s? That was the end of me and my t – – s.”