On September 14, Amy Winehouse would have turned 40 years old. However, the British singer’s voice was snuffed out forever on July 23, 2011, when she was found dead in her London apartment at age 27. She died “accidentally” according to a London court verdict. She had consumed five times more alcohol than the UK driving limit. The life of the interpreter Back to Black, rehab either valerie was riddled with successes, but also marked by drug and alcohol abuse and diseases such as bulimia. She never went unnoticed. More than 12 years after her death, the memory and music of Winehouse are still very present and her parents, Mitch and Janis, have decided to share in The Telegraph fragments of her daughter’s diaries, seeking to better understand everything that was inside her head and as her way of honoring what would have been her 40th birthday.
“Amy came into the world on September 14, 1983. She was four days late and we always joked that Amy was late for everything, including her own birth. […] She could be adorable and charming, but if she wasn’t happy, everyone knew it. ‘Shut up, Amy!’ was probably the most heard phrase in our house. Whether she was happy or sad, Amy loved to be the center of attention, ”her parents anticipate in the British environment. The artist’s private writings agree with her parents, showing that since adolescence she was aware that she stood out from the crowd and she enjoyed it. “I am glad to be different. It’s not like she wants to be like everyone else. I love having my own individual style. I love being loud and talking to people. It’s who I am”, he captured in his notebooks now made public with a flirtatious round calligraphy.
The jazz, blues and soul icon documented her school years in a scrapbook that she constantly updated, as her parents explain: “From the beginning, we realized that school was probably never going to satisfy her. ‘I’m bored’, she often repeated herself”. Instead, they report that since she was little, Winehouse was already devouring movies, musicals, novels, poetry, and music. She “she could recite lyrics and sing melodies after hearing a song, maybe just once or twice. At her grandmother Cynthia’s house she was surrounded by jazz: from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald. And she at home she interpreted songs from Mary Poppins or Jewish hymns”, they remember today.
As with any teenage diary, the pages of Amy’s were also littered with reflections on love. “Sometimes I wonder if there is someone, some guy out there who is as crazy as me. A nice guy with dark hair, who wears reading glasses and is a real kid? indie? piercing optional, preferably with a Scottish or Irish accent!” was her definition of the ideal guy. “And why do all of my brother’s friends fit this description, but I’m too young to do anything about it?” he lamented.
The man who came to mark the singer’s life the most was Blake Fielder-Civil, with whom she had an intermittent relationship for six years and was married between 2007 and 2009. They met at a pub from the London neighborhood of Camden Town, when they were both dating, but the crush was immediate and Amy soon left her boyfriend to go out with that man full of tattoos who captivated her from the beginning. Just a month after meeting him, she tattooed her name on her left breast, specifically it said “Blake’s” [de Blake], and he got Amy’s tattooed behind his ear. The obsessive relationship was fraught with alcohol and drug abuse and problems with the law – in fact, Blake was in prison serving a 32-month sentence for armed robbery when he discovered that Amy had died in 2011 – something that ended by burn the marriage Later, she had a brief four-month relationship with film director Reg Traviss, which ended after news broke of Traviss’s possible infidelity with his former partner.
“I hate my temper. Sometimes it eats me so much that I get physically violent with those I love. As much as I say ‘I’m sorry,’ it’s something they can never forget,” Winehouse confesses in her own handwriting. Her father, Mitch, remembers several heated arguments between father and daughter when she was a teenager, when she would suddenly interrupt him in the middle of the argument. “I’m sorry Dad. Wait a minute. I just have to write this down,” he announced, before picking up a pen and paper, writing down what Mitch had said, and then returning to the discussion, as his father now describes it: “Years later, some of those words may have ended in a song”.
Inside the notebooks, as his parents now show, he wrote songs and funny observations of people he had seen in pub and clubs or wherever you travel. In the end, his lyrics documented his life like a diary. So it was in the case of rehab, one of his most famous songs. “She had come to her house with her then managers, who were concerned about her drinking and wanted to get her professional treatment. ‘I don’t want to go, dad. I don’t have 90 days!’, she told Mitch. Several years later, that conversation was filtered through Amy’s creative lens, cut, and retooled to become a number one hit,” her mother narrates.
![Amy Winehouse, her father Mitch and her mother Janis pose with Amy's award for Best Song Musical for 'Love Is A Losing Game' at the 53rd Ivor Novello Awards on May 22, 2008 in London, England.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/ohIGrSYPjM_v7Q5iDRSQ2CD98FY=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/2DSXJETHGREAVJTM6WHCTFMYQA.jpg)
Going through their daughter’s journals hasn’t been an easy task for Mitch and Janis, who recognize in The Telegraph their fear of finding “much torment or misery” in any of her writings and admit that there is much about the artist that they still do not understand. “We don’t know for sure whether or not songwriting became a catharsis for Amy, but it certainly was a creative process that she returned to again and again in her happiest periods, as well as in her darkest moments of addiction,” they explain.
Even so, they also assure that reading the singer’s work always eases the devastation of losing her: “12 years after her death, looking back at these drawings and doodles still makes us smile, just like Amy did. Of course, we can’t whitewash her story. Yes, she was addicted and yes, her life was chaotic. Ultimately, her addictions robbed her and us of her life. But those are times we don’t stop.”
#Amy #Winehouses #parents #bring #light #singers #diaries #hate #temper #violent #love