"Far from a Celebrity memoir, Her Mother's Daughter," Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association wrote, “Despite the suggestive subtitle, Carroll's memoir is far less tell-all than it is her personal recollections of growing up feeling alienated from her adoptive family, her peers, and her religion. ... A thoughtful memoir of one woman's coming-of-age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.”

Linda was born to Paula Fox when she was 20, the result of a short-lived relationship. Paula lived under the roof of acting coach Stella Adler at the time, as did then unknown actor Marlon Brando. There have been persistent rumors that Brando fathered the child, although neither Brando nor Fox ever commented on the matter. Linda Carroll did not meet her birth mother until later in life. Given the tumultuous relationship with Paula's own biological parents, she gave the child up for adoption. Linda was adopted into a Catholic family of part Italian descent, and was raised in Pacific Heights by Jack and Louella Risi. Linda took her surname after her friend Judy Carroll, after Judy's death. Linda graduated from high school in 1961.

She married Writer and one-time Grateful Dead manager Hank Harrison in 1963 in Reno, Nevada and gave birth to a daughter, Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964, aged 20 as Linda's mother was. Within years of Courtney's birth, both Carroll's adoptive parents died. She divorced Harrison after eighteen months of marriage, alleging that he had given her the drug LSD, and brought her daughter Courtney with her to Marcola, Oregon. She had two other daughters, Nicole and Jaimee, with her second husband, Frank Rodríguez.

After finishing her bachelor's degree in Oregon in the 1970s, she moved to New Zealand. She returned to Oregon in the 1980s, received a masters in counseling, and began practicing as a therapist. Carroll and her Veterinarian husband, Tim Barraud, began to teach a couples course based on the Imago work of Harville Hendrix, the PAIRS training of Dr. Lori Gordon, and their own insights, study, and practices.

As an adult, Carroll found that her birth mother is the Novelist Paula Fox (her grandmother was Screenwriter Elsie Fox). In 2006, her memoir Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love, was published by Doubleday. Love's agent called the book a work of "vicious and greedy fiction", and said, "We find it astonishing that any mother should write such a book. This is especially true in the case of Ms Carroll, who abandoned her daughter when she was a seven-year-old and whom Ms Love thus barely knows at all." Linda Carroll, however, contends in her memoir that she left Courtney with a friend for just two months at age nine while she was looking for a home in New Zealand and that Courtney remained with her until she emancipated herself at age 16. Linda Carroll has not spoken to her daughter in years and remains estranged.

As of 2015, Carroll has five children and ten grandchildren.