Amy Winehouse Quotes

What kind of fuckery is this?

The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

I couldn't resist him, his eyes were like yours, his hair was exactly the shade of brown. He's just not as tall, but I couldn't tell, it was dark and I was lying down.

One day it may feel as if energy and enthusiasm are quenched, feelings dried up and emotions scorched, love and affection tangled in a harsh and uninviting setting. Nothing seems to grow anymore. No seed. No flowers. No foreseeable hope. No conceivable prospects. Any blossom of expectation seems to have become an illusion and life appears to have come to a standstill. If no seed of loving care is sown in the untilled, abandoned land, no bud can come into flower. Singer Amy Winehouse felt like lying fallow in the ground of a wasteland "with tears dry, dying a hundred times, going back to black" and leaving eventually for a place of ultimate sorrow and heartbreak, for a point of no return. ( “Amour en friche” )

If you don't throw yourself into something, you'll never know what you could have had.

Feel so fucking angry; don't want to be reminded of you, But when I left my shit in your kitchen, I said goodbye to your bedroom it smelled of you

I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don't think that there's a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much though.

We only said goodbye with words I died a hundred time, you go back to her and I go back to black...

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.

Mr False Pretence, you don't make sense I just don't know you But you make me cry, where's my kiss goodbye I think I love you

I can't help you if you won't help yourself.

You've got a degree in philosophy; so you think you're cleverer than me. But I'm not just some drama queen. Cause it's where you're at, not where you've been.

I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but I don't like girls pretending to be stupid because it's easier.

I love to live and I live to love.

Cause there's nothing, there's nothing you can teach me That I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway.

Relationship doesn’t remain, We resonate on different flames, I could cut you down again, If you were like all other men, If you were like all other men, I know that I could shut you down again

Emulate all the shit my mother hates, I can't help but demonstrate my freudian fate

You know I'm no good

Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.

I'm not Mickey Mouse, I'm a human being.

Current mood: David Foster Wallace meets Amy Winehouse.

It was precisely because her songs were dragged up out of her soul that they were so powerful and passionate. The ones that went into "Back to Black" were about the deepest emotions. And she went through hell to make it.

What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple; it actually is simple but it isn’t easy; it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.

Spurred by Amy’s death I’ve tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself.

There is no point in saying anything but the truth because, at the end of the day, you don't have to answer to anyone but yourself.

When will we get the chance to be just friends? It's never safe for us, not even in the evening, cuz I've been drinking. Not in the morning, when your shit works. It's always dangerous when everybody's sleeping, and I've been thinking...Can we be alone?

Tip to all British tabloids: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone. I repeat: Do Not Hack Amy Winehouse's Phone.

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.

Her death had a powerful impact on me I suppose because it was such an obvious shock, like watching someone for hours through a telescope advance towards you, fist extended with the intention of punching you in the face. Even though I saw it coming it still hurt when it eventually hit me.

my justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they're going to do for the next five or ten years. the time they spend thinking about their life, i just spend drinking

His face in my dreams, seizing my guts, he floods me with dread. Soaked in soul, he swims in my eyes by the bed. Pour myself over him, moon spilling in And I wake up alone.

I don't think I knew what depression was. I knew I felt funny sometimes and I was different. I think it's a musician thing. That's why I write music. You know, I'm not like some messed up person. There is a lot of people that suffer depression that don't have an outlet, you know what I mean? That can't pick up a guitar for an hour and feel better.

As she limped down the stairs, she considered all the drugs in her backpack. Tramadol, methadone, ketamine, buprenorphine. Mix them all into a pint of tequila and she could get a front-row seat to Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse talking about what a douche Jim Morrison could be.

When Amy returned to London she told me excitedly about some of the Hispanic women she’d seen in Miami, and how she wanted to blend their look – thick eyebrows, heavy eye-liner, bright red lipstick – with her passion for the sixties ‘beehive’.

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven't been through it don't understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you're living it, it's like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there's the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu - and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you'll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there's the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse.

I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes.’ -- from 12-year-old Amy Winehouse’s scholarship application to Marylebone’s Sylvia Young Theatre School (Janis Winehouse, 'Loving Amy: A Mother’s Story')

I felt awful as I drove away to live with Melody in Barnet. I stayed with her for six months before I moved in with Jane. Looking back now, I was a coward for allowing the situation to go on for so long, but I wanted to keep everybody happy. Strangely, after I left I started seeing more of the kids than I had before. My friends thought that Amy didn’t seem much affected by the divorce, and when I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she said, ‘You’re still my dad and Mum’s still my mum. What’s to talk about?

She could barely find her place in the world, let alone at home.

Other children seemed to develop a pack mentality around Amy, probably because it was the easiest way to force her back.

I visited Amy as often as I could at the hospital. When you’re dealing with someone who’s recovering from drug addiction, you look for small signs of progress wherever you can find them,

She was twenty, emotionally immature, and out there on her own. I don’t think Amy ever really got to know herself; regrettably she never got appreciate herself or feel comfortable with herself.

I don't ever wanna drink again I just, oh, I just need a friend I'm not gonna spend ten weeks Have everyone think I'm on the mend And it's not just my pride It's just 'til these tears have dried

Miriam woke up to find Io sitting on the floor next to her. His gaze brightened and he smiled. "How do you feel?" he said. He helped her sit up. "Like shit." She groaned. "Don't get me wrong, I feel better than I did, but damn, this shit sucks." Who the hell had let in the army of Terminators to play Rock 'Em Sock 'Em inside her body? Io chuckled at her surprisingly unfeminine manner of speaking and sat down beside her. "I gave you a potent detox with my venom. I needed to get the cobalt out of your system." "Ah, I see." She leaned her face into her hands. "Great. Just great. I don't know whether to thank you or hit you." How did she always seem to put her worst face forward around this guy? The one male she wanted to impress and all she did was behave like a strung-out junkie around him. The vampire version of Amy Winehouse. How could he not be impressed? Uh-huh, right.

Apart from the sampler, though, I still hadn’t heard the songs that were on the short-list for Frank and Amy seemed a bit reticent about letting me listen to them. Maybe she thought lyrics like ‘the only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right’ might shock me or that I’d embarrass her. I teased her after I’d finally heard the song. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ I said. ‘That song “In My Bed” when you sing—’ ‘Dad! I don’t want to talk about it!

Amy was alone, deserted by her ‘friends’ now that she wasn’t doing drugs. She was lonely and wanted to go out, but couldn’t persuade herself to leave the house. It was heartbreaking to see her like that. She’d always been such a strong character, always at the centre of every gathering, and now she was quiet and on her own.

Seeing it now, it was Amy experimenting with herself. It was a persona that she went on to embellish, but there was no doubt in my mind that having a public face exacerbated an inner conflict for Amy. She was naturally provocative because it attracted attention, but once she’d got that attention she couldn’t control what happened next and then she shied away from it.

There was little continuity to their lives, which only became more fragmented when we separated. To Amy, ‘family’ had become more of a romantic idea than something immediate or tangible. It was me, Alex and her now, and she became fiercely protective of that unit. But my feeling was by then that she’d lost faith in family life completely, if she ever really knew what it was.

How do you become a person? Usually, instead of trying to get a job, I listen to music on YouTube, instead of being a person, I try to become the notes of songs, the chord structure of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” covered by Amy Winehouse, I want to become that song, I learn the song on guitar and strum it on my adobe porch thing, trying to become non-human, sometimes I try to become the taste of a Carl’s Jr. cheeseburger, I want to be that delicious, that bad for you.   Sometimes I listen to Amitabha chants, Navajo chants, even old Kentucky Old Regular Baptists call out chants, I want to be a pure feeling, that may lead to heaven, but instead I am Noah Cicero, sometimes I scream, I can’t be controlled, I can’t be tamed, because I don’t know what to be—

I went upstairs and tried to talk some sense into her but it was a waste of time. When she was high, she would babble about whatever came into her head. It was painful to watch and even worse to listen to. At one point Amy told me to cancel a proposed deal to license a perfume with her name attached to it. ‘I don’t want to hurt my credibility,’ she told me, as she sat there high on crack. ‘Hurt your credibility? What do you think smoking crack cocaine is doing to your credibility?’ It was an impossible conversation. I stormed out, with Amy shouting for me to come back. I felt as low as I’d ever been. I didn’t think Amy would die, but I just couldn’t see a way out of this. You don’t become an expert in anything overnight, and I was still learning how best to deal with an addict. Somehow or other I had to speed up the learning process.

After Frank came out, Amy would begin a performance at a gig by walking onstage, clapping and chanting, ‘Class-A drugs are for mugs. Class-A drugs are for mugs …’ She’d get the whole audience to join in until they’d all be clapping and chanting as she launched into her first number. Although Amy was smoking cannabis, she had always been totally against class-A drugs. Blake Fielder-Civil changed that. Amy first met him early in 2005 at the Good Mixer pub in Camden. None of Amy’s friends that I’ve spoken to over the years can remember exactly what led to this meeting. But after that encounter she talked about him a lot. ‘When am I going to meet him, darling?’ I asked. Amy was evasive, which was probably, I learned later, because Blake was in a relationship. Amy knew about this, so initially you could say that Amy was ‘the other woman’. And although she knew that he was seeing someone else, it was only about a month after they’d met that she had his name tattooed over her left breast. It was clear that she loved him – that they loved each other – but it was also clear that Blake had his problems. It was a stormy relationship from the start. A few weeks after they’d met, Blake told Amy that he’d finished with the other girl, and Amy, who never did anything by halves, was now fully obsessed with him.

And then, I met him , Malay Roychoudhury, and a strange fear gripped me. Frankly, I am dead scared of such people. There is a community of artists who’re too real in their artistry. This class that charts names like, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and many others are Art Extremists, a term I’ve coined for them. They exert an irresistible attraction towards the opposite sex, who’re drawn to the edgy and dangerous involvement they have with their art and times. Pablo Picasso is often compared to the Minataur, the half man-half monster. Like the Minataur he demanded women to be ‘sacrificed’ to him, a view that is corroborated in his tumultuous personal life, that left behind a trail of agonized wives, mistresses and children. Malay Roychoudhury told me of a woman who was 20 years his junior and who had threatened him with suicide if he didn’t marry her. She kept her promise and drank toilet-acid.

I knew that Amy couldn’t have died from a drug overdose, as she had been drug-free since 2008. But although she had been so brave and had fought so hard in her recovery from alcoholism, I knew she must have lapsed once again. I thought that Amy hadn’t had a drink for three weeks. But she had actually started drinking at Dionne’s Roundhouse gig the previous Wednesday. I didn’t know that at the time. The following morning Janis, Jane, Richard Collins (Janis’s fiancé), Raye, Reg and I went to St Pancras mortuary to officially identify Amy. Alex couldn’t bring himself to go, which I fully understood. When we arrived there were loads of paps outside the court, but they were all very respectful. We were shown into a room and saw Amy behind a window. She looked very, very peaceful, as if she was just asleep, which in a way made it a lot harder. She looked lovely. There was a slight red blotchiness to her skin, which was why, at the time, I thought she might have had a seizure: she looked as she had done when she had had seizures in the past. Eventually the others left Janis and me to say goodbye to Amy by ourselves. We were with her for about fifteen minutes. We put our hands on the glass partition and spoke to her. We told her that Mummy and Daddy were with her and that we would always love her. I can’t express what it was like. It was the worst feeling in the world.

Regrettably, all that happened was that Blake became another man over whom Amy sought control but who ended up controlling her. Blake clearly loved Amy but I don’t believe he was ever emotionally there for her. That the media built Blake up to be an evil monster was laughable to me. He was a baby boy who had never grown up himself and who demanded unhealthy amounts of attention. Every time he pulled away from Amy, she chased him. It was infatuation. As far as I could see, their relationship had very little to do with kindness or care at that stage and everything to do with co-dependency.

A lot of her songs were to do with Blake, which did not escape Mark’s attention. She told Mark that writing songs about him was cathartic and that ‘Back to Black’ summed up what had happened when their relationship had ended: Blake had gone back to his ex and Amy to black, or drinking and hard times. It was some of her most inspired writing because, for better or worse, she’d lived it. Mark and Amy inspired each other musically, each bringing out fresh ideas in the other. One day they decided to take a quick stroll around the neighbourhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present. On the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake, then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she’d been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. ‘You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.’ ‘That’s quite gimmicky,’ Mark replied. ‘It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.’ Of course, Amy had written that line in one of her books ages ago. She’d told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment ‘Rehab’ came to life. Amy had also been working on a tune for the ‘hook’, but when she played it to Mark later that day it started out as a slow blues shuffle – it was like a twelve-bar blues progression. Mark suggested that she should think about doing a sixties girl-group sound, as she liked them so much. He also thought it would be fun to put in the Beatles-style E minor and A minor chords, which would give it a jangly feel. Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote ‘Rehab’ in just three hours. If you had sat Amy down with a pen and paper every day, she wouldn’t have written a song. But every now and then, something or someone turned the light on in her head and she wrote something brilliant. During that time it happened over and over again. The sessions in the studio became very intense and tiring, especially for Mark, who would sometimes work a double shift and then fall asleep. He would wake up with his head in Amy’s lap and she would be stroking his hair, as if he was a four-year-old. Mark was a few years older than Amy, but he told me he found her very motherly and kind.

I’m putting you in that dumpster until you say you’re going to the meeting,’ he told her. Amy started to laugh because she thought Nick wouldn’t do it, but he picked her up, put her in the dumpster and closed the lid. ‘I’m not letting you out until you say you’re coming to the meeting.’ She was banging on the side of the dumpster and shouting her head off. But it was only after she’d agreed to go to the meeting that Nick let her out. She immediately screamed, ‘KIDNAP! RAPE!’ They were still arguing as they walked into the meeting. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Nick said. Then Amy jumped in: ‘Yeah, that’s cos Nick just tried to rape me.

I’d stopped trying to work out what was going on in Amy’s mind. To try and make sense of everything was both exhausting and impossible. Whatever Amy felt at any given moment, those feelings were real to her and she acted on them. But to be around her often felt as though I’d been given a role in a melodrama where she was playing the lead part. I went along with it and reluctantly accepted that that was the way Amy expressed herself. But then, a lot of the time Amy was playing a character I didn’t recognise. Her brother rarely let her get away with this and would often confront her about the multitude of personas she brought out at any given time. ‘Who are you now?’ he’d ask her. But all she ever did was pause momentarily before carrying on.

Amy always tried to maintain some semblance of dignity in front of me. Even so, I never met the same Amy more than once. On some days she behaved like a small child, sucking her thumb, talking in a baby voice and sitting on my knee; at other times she'd adopt the aggressive, butch act, the Rizzo character - the girl who had 'out-Jaggered Jagger'. The more vulnerable she felt, the more pronounced that persona would become. I think she brought her characters out as coping mechanisms, to get her through anxious moments or stressful situations. In all honesty there was rarely a time at Camden Square [her last home] when Amy was a whole person. Rather, she continued to be this fragmented girl, a series of creations I suppose I'd become accustomed to.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven’t been through it don’t understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the same thing over and over again; but when you’re living it, it’s like being a hamster on a wheel. Every day there’s the chronic anxiety of waiting for news, the horrible rush when it turns out to be bad, the overwhelming sense of déjà vu – and the knowledge that, despite your best efforts, you’ll probably be here again. Even so-called good days are not without their drawbacks. You enjoy them as much as you can, but in the back of your mind there’s the lurking fear that tomorrow you could be back to square one again, or worse. For me, this was life with Amy. If I was stopped by someone in the street and they asked how Amy was doing, I knew they wouldn’t understand if I told them what was going on. I’d learned that it’s nearly impossible to explain how this could keep happening. I’d imagined that, as they offered sympathy, they’d be wondering, How can her family let this carry on? Or, Why didn’t they lock her up until she was clean? But unless an addict wants to quit, they’ll find a way to get drugs, and as soon as they leave the rehab facility they’ll pick up where they left off. Long before Amy was an addict, no one could tell her what to do. Once she became an addict, that stubbornness just got worse. There were times when she wanted to be clean, but the times when she didn’t outnumbered them.

The day-to-day changes in Amy amazed me: the next evening Raye called me from the studio to say that she and Mark had had a really good day working. He also said that she had been able to take her prescribed Subutex, as she had been drug-free for twelve hours. When it came time for her next dose, though, she couldn’t have it as, once again, she had taken other drugs. As a result, she went into withdrawal and the whole process started yet again. That Sunday, I drove down to the Henley studio to find Amy in bed. She was filthy and suffering the effects of withdrawal. I managed to get her into the shower, realizing again how painfully thin she was. If Amy had died at that point, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. I put her back to bed and stayed with her until she fell asleep. Sitting in a chair next to her bed, I despaired. I was running out of ideas. If she took drugs she couldn’t take Subutex for twelve hours. If she didn’t take Subutex she went into withdrawal so she took more drugs. A horrible vicious circle.

Thank god for Vegas. Seriously. A lobotomy wasn’t as effective as a weekend three hours of Red Bull away (from LA, not Pismo) where I wore the thinnest pinned stilettos, gambled like a sweaty degenerate mobster in black loafers, drank like Amy Winehouse and Charles Bukowski’s baby, and snorted throat-dripping lines of coke in a Hard Rock Hotel bathroom with four new best friends. I’d giddily rub off any one of those from the to-do list I wrote in eyeliner on my hotel bathroom mirror.

Hey,” I say back. “How’s yours?” she asks. “Crying. How’s yours?” “Oh boy.” She pulls a face. “She got this email from him. Saying he loves her and that she’s the only one.” I scowl. “The only one? After his wife and that girl from two years ago?” “I know, right? The only one right now. Or when he was writing the email. Pig.” Paige is scowling too. “So she’s all psyched up again. I swear, it’s pathetic.” “His wife’s pregnant,” I say hopelessly, because it seems to me such a huge deal--another baby coming!--that it should stop dead any debate Kendra’s having with herself about whether she should believe Luigi. “I know! But she’s reading the email over and over again and playing Adele and Amy Winehouse,” Paige reveals. “Adele and Amy Winehouse? Oh no. We’d better keep an eye on her,” I say grimly.

But she’s reading the email over and over again and playing Adele and Amy Winehouse,” Paige reveals. "Adele and Amy Winehouse? Oh no. We’d better keep an eye on her,” I say grimly.

This is possibly what drove Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain to early graves. They could not handle being cogs. They could not handle monetizing their content. That was not the reason they become bohemian singers.

Exercise, as it currently exists in most of our lives, sucks. Like most care tasks, when they function only to fulfill external standards of what we should be doing, it actually moves us further away from real care for self. But when I look back at my life and ask myself, “What memories of movement do I have that are joyful?” I well up with tears. I remember cheerleading in the eighth grade and feeling so happy as my body hit every beat on point and in sync with the rest of my team. I remember jumping higher than I think any human has as we won second place in a championship. I remember how strong I felt that I could throw a girl in the air. I remember youth soccer games and the absolute rush it gave me to feel my foot connect with power to the ball. I remember dancing stoned out of my mind at a Bob Marley festival, barefoot and uncaring that my body moved like a jellyfish, oblivious to the beat or how it should be moving. I remember, at ten years sober, when my wedding DJ dedicated “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse to all of us who had come through hell and survived and an entire dance floor of little sober assholes absolutely went nuts on the dance floor. I remember Josh splitting his pants. I remember my husband looking at me like no other woman existed. I remember being carried over the threshold of our hotel that night, not out of tradition, but because I had worn the bottoms of my feet raw dancing. When did movement lose its pleasure? When did my adult life stop including activities that made movement joyful? Can I get it back? Can you? Can we try together?

Her smile was brittle. "Well, I know Kieran's achieving something if someone like you is willing to be in a relationship with him." "Someone like me?" She gestured to me from head to toe. "Respectable. Elegantly dressed, if a little flamboyant with color. Beautiful manners, well-spoken. Clearly you listened to your parents when they told you how to behave." I choked back a snort at the thought of my biological father being Mr. Manners. The sheer audacity of it. "Kieran probably hasn't told you about all the times we had to get him out of trouble," she continued. I blinked, confused. "No." She ticked off on her fingers as she spoke. "He skipped classes, he stole money out of my wallet, he crashed our cars more than once. Not to mention the drinking, my God. He couldn't hold his liquor at all. We were so ashamed." I held back my eye roll. It was like having a conversation with a steamroller. As she continued to list Kieran's crimes, I realized that she relished this monologue, all the ways he'd done them wrong. Like she never wanted him to grow up because then she'd have to stop being a martyr. "But anyway, that's all in the past. Finally, he's become who we always wanted him to be, and we can hold our heads up." The thought of being a source of pride to these snobby, plastic people made me want to drink ten flutes of prosecco, climb onto their dining room table, and do Amy Winehouse karaoke, Diane's advice about polish and presentation be damned. But all I needed to shock them was the truth. "I haven't seen my father in over twenty years," I began. "As far as I know he's still the lead singer of the second-best hair metal band in Spokane. My mother's salary was for keeping herself in clothes and boyfriends. Sometimes I had to break into my piggy bank so that I could by Cup O' Noodles at 7-Eleven for my brother and me. I've made a good life in spite of my parents, not because of them. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with your son. I knew he was a survivor, too. But thank you for the compliments. Now, if you'll excuse me.

So this was how Amy Winehouse felt. And she was dead now. Something to think about it. Except I wasn’t Amy Winehouse.

I like singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there’s no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So,

Chère Amy Winehouse, [...] Quand ton premier album est sorti, tu avais encore l'air innocente, tu étais une jolie fille qui, dans les interviews, disait se trouver laide. Mais, à ton deuxième disque, on aurait dit que tu t'étais inventée un nouveau personnage. Tu montais sur scène dans ta petite robe, en sirotant un verre, avec ta grosse choucroute sur la tête et tes yeux maquillés à la Cléopâtre, et tu chantais d'une voix qui tombait comme un torrent de ton corps frêle. Tu portais tes vêtements comme une armure, mais, dans tes chansons, tu te livrais totalement.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

As a mum you never stop worrying about your kids, but I had spent years either saving Amy from disaster or diverting her with the hope that she’d grab an opportunity and run with it, but nothing ever seemed to work. However much time and energy I ploughed into her, Amy wanted more; whatever I gave, it never seemed to be enough. Of course, my mother’s instinct was to carry on rescuing Amy no matter what. Isn’t that what love is? In years to come, my notion of what love is would be tested way beyond that of most parents. In those days, though, I willed myself not to lose faith in her, nor in myself in the process, but I had to accept there was no rulebook made for Amy.

Every day brings me new evidence that women, by and large, do not like themselves very much: their ambition gaps, their orgasm gaps, their impostor syndromes, their poor body images, their endless variety of real or perceived failures, including their failures to feel good about who and what they are. Their trainwrecks, and their need for trainwrecks; the enduring, self-loathing need to find someone about whom they can say well, at least I’m not that girl. But, in the context of trainwreck media, a female self-confidence gap is not only predictable, it’s practically unavoidable. We can’t spend twelve hours a day mainlining ideas of sexual or emotional or aging or ill women as monsters, messes, and freaks, then expect to wake up feeling beautiful and confident in the morning. Every “ugly” photo of Amy Winehouse, every nasty word typed about Azealia Banks in a comment section, is going to come back the next time we’re vulnerable, and take yet another chunk out of our ability to believe that we can screw up and still be basically worthwhile.

I’d watched my daughter hatch into this butterfly. Now, just like a butterfly, she flitted around and only landed near me now and again. Every time I saw her she’d settle for a moment, then she’d be off.

I suspect that she was both exhilarated and completely terrified that life was moving so fast for her.

There were aspects of her spiralling problems that were difficult to understand, but they were always made worse by the lies she told to the people who loved her most. And, worst of all, the lies Amy told herself.

...the Amy I knew was a regular tomboy; now it was as if she’d turned up in fancy dress. Did Amy even know who she was anymore? In the hectic life she’d now been catapulted into, I don’t believe she ever had enough time to find out.

Inside, Amy never really forgot who she was either; I think it was the recognition that this life in the spotlight was one great illusion that became the most dissatisfying for her. It was all she’d ever wished for, but the reality was so different from how she’d imagined it.

She wasn’t usually the kind of girl to let things go to her head but success and the public attention that came with it created a fear in her far deeper than the euphoria of winning. All this expectation placed on a girl who couldn't even convince herself that she could deliver, let alone anyone else.

She was impossible to pin down, and it struck me that she was living her life as if she wasn’t connected to it. She’d simply lost any emotional connection with herself.

I saw a girl whose life was overwhelming her, more than she had ever anticipated.

Underneath, I longed to be plain old Janis Winehouse again, the pharmacist from north London who lived an ordinary if topsy-turvy life but who was proud of everything she’d achieved and loved her kids with all her heart.

My God, Amy never held back in presenting herself to the world superficially - taking her clothes off, being the life and soul of the party - but she could never sit with herself long enough to face herself.

Amy always tried to maintain some semblance of dignity in front of me. Even so, I never met the same Amy more than once. On some days she behaved like a small child, sucking her thumb, talking in a baby voice and sitting on my knee; at other times she'd adopt the aggressive, butch act, the Rizzo character - the girl who had 'out-Jaggered Jagger'. The more vulnerable she felt, the more pronounced that persona would become. I think she brought her characters out as coping mechanisms, to get her through anxious moments or stressful situations. In all honesty there was rarely a time at Camden Square when Amy was a whole person. Rather, she continued to be this fragmented girl, a series of creations I suppose I'd become accustomed to.

I boiled for days. Not only did I hate the fact that she’d married Blake, but I hated the fact that of all the places on the planet, she’d chosen Miami. Not for a moment do I think that Amy would have made the connection. She was in her own ‘Amy bubble’ without a care for anyone other than herself. Miami? When I had landed there thirty-five years earlier it had been about me finding freedom and fulfilment through working and experiencing the world. I have held onto that positive experience throughout my entire life, steadily improving my confidence and my self-respect no matter what. Now here was Amy, with more professional and financial power than I could ever have imagined, and what was she doing? Throwing it all away by getting hitched to some no-hoper.

There’s no doubt Amy met the world with all guns blazing, but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what people made of her. Everybody expected to see this rotund American black woman in her forties, but what they got was Amy - short, curvy, Jewish, white and only just turned twenty. What a living, breathing contradiction my daughter was.

She was twenty, emotionally immature, and out there on her own. I don’t think Amy ever really got to know herself; regrettably she never got to appreciate herself or feel comfortable with herself.

I worry about the day when Amy stops being alive in my head and in my heart. I don’t want that day to ever come. I don’t think it ever will. I loved her. I will always love her, and I miss everything about her. Amy, bless her, was larger than life.

Amy’s passing did not follow a clear line. It was jumbled, and her life was unfinished- not life’s natural order at all. She left no answers, only questions, and in the years since her death I’ve found myself trying to make sense of the frayed ends of her extraordinary existence.

She became wildly sentimental and wildy ill-natured. She’d sit in front of me, her short skirt riding up her legs and her sharp bones protruding from her knees. I could see it happening. I could see her tiny body disintegrating, but there was nothing I could do. As her mother, I was completely helpless. I could ring her and I could visit her, but I couldn’t save her. I knew that if I tried to I would lose myself too.

Amy came into my life like a whirlwind and changed it for ever.

Amy achieved pop stardom by rebelling against the manufactured world of pop music. In the end, she rebelled against everything else too, and turned it inwards on herself.

As a mum you never stop worrying about your kids, but I had spent years either saving Amy from disaster or diverting her with the hope that she’d grab an opportunity and run with it, but nothing ever seemed to work. However much time and energy I ploughed into her, Amy wanted more; whatever I gave, it never seemed to be enough. Of course, my mother’s instinct was to carry on rescuing Amy no matter what. Isn’t that what love is? In years to come, my notion of what love is would be tested way beyond that of most parents. In those days, though, I willed myself not to lose faith in her, nor in myself in the porcee, but I had to accept there was no rulebook made for Amy.

Sometimes we figure her out; at other times she is the ball of confusion she always was.

Love is a losing game. You were so right Amy Winehouse - look where love has got me! Wait, look where it got you - which somehow makes me a winner. A pyrrhic victory.