This is at least the fifth book I’ve read about Amy since she died. Each one brings a unique perspective and has some kind of closeness to its subject matter, whether it is her life or her music, that seems free of lurid tabloid concerns. The next most recent one is Beyond Black, which is like the graphic design or couture companion to this text. In Beyond Black, we learn about the influences she took from certain designers, musicians, and writers. It’s notably free of her voice. We hear mostly from her friends who knew her before she was famous or just as she was entering into the worldwide conversation. Some of their stories are alternately heartbreaking and wistful because they humanize her in a way that mass media never could. It’s important to have these stories to help bring out the side of her personality that is mostly hidden when looking in from the top down. Honestly, if you were looking for just one book to understand her, Beyond Black would help greatly. If you want to understand her most powerful testament to the human condition, then Donald Brackett’s Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece does the job.
The most powerful takeaway I have from this book is the profound sense of loss we all suffered from her death. She simply will not be able to share her insights with us any more. Yes, she “lives on” in reams of unpublished lyrics, but that’s more tantalizing than anything. She was famously unproductive after the success of “Back to Black,” so you have only your imagination to help you fill in the gaps of phrasing and instrumentation that might have accompanied the many lyrical excerpts throughout the years represented in her journals. You get a sense of how strong her sense of conviction in her abilities was when reading even her earliest to-do lists. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine someone so driven wouldn’t have been as successful as she was.
I can do without the occasional spreads of pull quotes with mismatched fonts. They look like the worst of tumblr or instagram inspirational quotes over hazy landscapes. Even if her words are meaningful, the decision to render them in this way subtracts from their power. It’s also unclear whether the words that appear on these pages are from her journals or from interview responses as they are uncited and do not appear elsewhere in the text. They read more like spoken language than written language and cover topics that might only have come up if someone else prompted her to think of them. Come to think of it, a book collecting her interviews would be an easy purchase for me.
The bulk of the words in In Her Words are obviously Amy’s, but the framing her parents give throughout the text does not mention Blake Fielder-Civil at all. They mention that fame was hard on her but that’s about as close as they come. Her mother said of her signature beehive hairstyle in Loving Amy: A Mother's Story that it was as much about a tribute to The RONETTES as it was a physical barrier, a form of armor, that she wore to protect herself from the world. That observation rings true in that Amy needed protection from the media only because of how Blake brought her world down. As her father wrote in reference to “Back to Black,” in Amy, My Daughter, “I was blown away, beyond proud. But deep down, I never wanted Amy to write another album like it. The songs are amazing, but she went through hell to write them. I don’t like Back to Black as much as I like Frank; I never really did. And that’s for one reason only: all of the songs on Back to Black, apart from ‘Rehab,’ are about Blake. It occurred to me recently that one of the biggest-selling UK albums of the twenty-first century so far is about the biggest low-life scumbag that God ever put breath into. Quite ironic, isn’t it? Mind you, you don’t get albums written about really good people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, do you? Good people’s places in Heaven may be assured, but nobody’s going to have a chart-topping album full of songs about someone’s good deeds” (p. 80). Taking her father’s past words about Blake in mind, it’s no surprise that her parents wouldn’t have wanted to focus on him in these pages. Still, did he not figure into her journals at all, or was his presence in there too gruesome for the family to include?
(This review originally appeared in a slightly shorter version in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)
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