Dennis Kersten
According to her parents, Amy Winehouse was quite a private person before she became famous as the voice of her generation. As a young girl she’d spend ages in her bedroom writing and drawing stuff she’d typically keep to herself. Even as an artist she would never play her family a new song before it was absolutely perfect. You’d think, then, that Winehouse would have dreaded the prospect of the publication of her juvenilia after her death. Little did anyone know that it would come so soon, after a short but commercially as well as critically successful career, which spawned two studio albums, a number of hit singles and many iconic live performances. As last year’s publication of Amy Winehouse In Her Words suggests, there was little difference between public and private Amy. It shows how her early writing actually prepared for the daring candor and self-deprecating humour of her songs.
The book’s arrival was perhaps inevitable as well: posthumous releases of musicians’ private papers have become something of a staple of pop life writing. The last couple of decades have seen the publication of Kurt Cobain’s Journals (2002), The John Lennon Letters (2012), Jimi Hendrix’ Starting at Zero: His Own Story (2013), Ian Curtis’ So This Is Permanence (2014) and Prince’s The Beautiful Ones (2019). Some of these piece together a more or less complete autobiographical narrative by carefully sequencing extant journal fragments, quotes from interviews and song lyrics (Hendrix), while others bring together facsimile of letters, notebooks and other memorabilia without too much interference from curators or editors (Curtis). Amy Winehouse’s book falls in between these categories and most resembles Prince’s memoir, which supplements His Purpleness’ own writing with editorial commentary and pre-fame photographs from family albums.
In Her Words was compiled by Winehouse’s parents and is divided into several sections, from “Early Years” and “School Days” to “Fame” and “Legacy”. All of these are prefaced by short biographical chapters by Janis Winehouse-Collins and Mitch Winehouse, who also provide commentary to the visual material. The latter confirms that Winehouse was an “obsessive documenter” (16) of her own life from an early age onwards. She loved making lists: of words to describe herself (“loud, bright, bold, DRAMATIC, MELODRAMATIC”), but also of her “trademarks” as an artist (“walking bass, sweet jazz chords, hip hop beats”). Some of her notes can be read as memos to herself (“New rule: always track m8’s/ layer harmonies over em”). We learn that Winehouse was given the nickname of “Nooge” by her mother, “a Yiddish word that means she was always pushing the boundaries” (37). Even funnier is the letter in which the gobby young Amy tells the story of how she is nicknamed “Main Mouth” by a boy she meets on holiday, who subsequently christens her two best friends “Mouth 2” and “Mouth 3” (93).
The closer Winehouse gets to adulthood, the longer and more seriously self-reflective her writing becomes. Some reviewers have called In Her Words a “sanitised” portrait, a criticism Janis and Mitch anticipate by writing that “Despite what many people presume or have written about Amy’s life in the past, we’re hard-pressed to find much torment or misery in any of her writings” (15). There are definitely stories missing and Janis and Mitch sometimes seem at a loss as to how to read the prose poems and diary-like pages from their daughter’s (late-)adolescence. They comment less frequently on texts from this period, which does leave room for readers to interpret these more emotional texts independently. On the whole, the book is a treat for fans, who are having a field day anyway, with the recent release of Sam Taylor-Wood’s biopic Back to Black, starring Marisa Abela.
A Losing Game
Naturally, any book about a tempestuous life like Amy Winehouse’s – or, indeed, any human life – will have to make compromises as to what to include and what not, even if its title or its whole paratextual presentation may imply that readers will get the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In the end, even life writing texts that “simply” let their auto/biographical subjects speak through the private papers they left behind only offer interpretations of those people’s life stories – or especially such texts, as the material they share with the world is necessarily curated and, thus, an inevitable framing of fact. It’s the eternal dilemma facing all auto/biographers: it’s impossible to represent “the whole truth” without form, but form has the nasty habit of shaping meaning.
So if, as Winehouse sang, love is a losing game, then life writing is at least… complicated. Perhaps the more so in biographies, texts that write the lives of others, even if the biographical and autobiographical are never easily separated (hence, the use of the slash in “auto/biography” by life writing scholars). Indeed, as Joanna Biggs writes in her LRB review of Catherine Lacey’s novel Biography of X (2023), “The problem with biography is that it’s impossible.” Of course, all depends on what you expect life narratives to do, but the representation of actual people in writing is never as perfectly factual, objective and disinterested as some auto/biographies want us to believe.
The “problem” of biography may actually explain many readers’ fascination for “real life” stories, but perhaps also why biofiction – the merging of fact and fiction in, for example, novels about historical individuals – remains one of life writing’s most popular sub-genres. Fiction is form shaping meaning without fixing it. Or, to borrow from Michel Foucault, fiction is form shaping a proliferation of meaning. Biofiction, especially when it writes the lives of artists, also offers the opportunity to refer to the work of its subjects without suggesting one-to-one correspondences between life and art. In fictionalised life narratives about authors, you can let their own fiction speak again (and for itself), raising fundamental questions about the relation between life and art as well as the very process of life writing itself. The strongest scenes in Taylor-Wood’s Back to Black may be those in which Amy/ Marisa Abela is seen in action as a singer and performer. Winehouse’s songs and how they are delivered say it all, really. The more so since the film – perhaps deliberately, then – spends more time on Amy’s life beyond the studio and the stage.
Playing with Chronology
As a life writing text, In Her Words has an intriguing and meaningful shape as well. The order in which the story is told contributes to the image it construes of, as it says on the back cover, a “girl who became a legend”. It tries to create a more or less coherent and auto/biographically fairly conventional narrative with, among other things, chronologically organised chapters on childhood, school, professional life etc. The book emphasises certain topics while skipping others and there is an interesting dynamic at work in the interaction between the visual material and the accompanying commentary – especially when some writings and/ or photographs are explained and others aren’t.
The book spends quite some time on Winehouse’s childhood and adolescence, while the “Fame” section only starts on p. 230 (of 288) and contains more photographs than personal notes; a result, her parents write, of her touring schedule, a lack of privacy and the impact of her addictions. A striking absence is Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s former husband. When reading In Her Words – Winehouse’s notes as well as her parents’ commentary – you’d think he never even crossed paths with his wife, while Taylor-Wood’s film turns their love affair into one of its focal points. In their foreword, her parents do once mention the “ill-fated relationship” documented by the Back to Black album (26), but they refrain from naming Fielder-Civil.
In Her Words may be structured rather traditionally chapter-wise, it does play with chronology in a number of significant ways. The highlighted quotes from Winehouse’s writings on spreads of pages not only function to link and comment on parts of her life story, they also generate emotional responses when their dramatic irony is recognised. For example, the final quote of the book reads: “I’ve got all this time to make that happen… I’ve got years to do music”, sentences that acquire the weight of “famous last words” as a consequence of their appearance as some sort of book conclusion. Sometimes, a phrase from a letter or a note is anachronistically superimposed on a photograph from another, often earlier source. One instance is the handwritten Michael Jackson reference “You know Im bad Im bad Im bad” projected onto a picture of a moody young Amy (67), which creates a humorous effect by appealing to readers’ knowledge of Winehouse’s later life.
Apart from these ironic anachronisms, there are also quotes that acquire a specific meaning when taken out of context. In “Early Years”, amid memorabilia of her childhood, Winehouse comments: “Seeing as I was very young, I don’t remember much. But I do remember being an angel” (74). As becomes clear one section later, this apparent retrospective reflection on her younger self is actually lifted from a primary school scrapbook chronicling her appearance in a nativity play as, well, angel (87).
The Genuine Article
Without explaining anything away, In Her Words makes you want to revisit her two studio albums, Frank and Back to Black, as well as wonder about the connections between Winehouse’s private writing and her songs. As said, the book adds to the suggestion that her song lyrics organically developed from the autobiographical dimension of her private writing, but it does so while raising the question if Winehouse’s songs should also be listened to as further exploring that writing’s note-to-self aspect. Which is not to say that she’s wasn’t interested in communicating with an audience, or that it’s difficult to identify with the very personal emotions she processed through songs like “What Is It About Men” and “You Know I’m No Good”. She was never so pretentious as to present her own experiences as symbolising the “human condition” – to put it MELODRAMATICALLY. But even without intentionally universalising personal pain, Winehouse clearly struck a chord with fans who love her music not only because they recognise themselves in her stories, but also because she told these with such brutal honesty.
She certainly wasn’t some kind of ten-a-penny, sweet-talking singer-songwriter; “Main Mouth” could be tough as well – both on others and herself. In fact, most music fans’ first introduction to Amy Winehouse will have been her debut single and Frank opening track “Stronger Than Me”, in which she effectively disses a “weak” boyfriend by, among other things, asking him if he is gay. (Fittingly, in Taylor-Wood’s film, Winehouse’s harder side is first revealed via the scene in which she dumps said boyfriend.) Equally vulnerable and defiant, she was real: in an industry in which authenticity is so often just another performance, Amy Winehouse stood out as the genuine article. To her parents’ credit, In Her Words doesn’t hammer home the message. But then again, there’s no need with the kind of material it so beautifully presents.
Culture Weekly 