Blair's Reviews > Amy Winehouse – In Her Words

I wanted to read this and I enjoyed it in parts, but I was left feeling conflicted about the fact that it’s arguably quite an intrusive endeavour. In Her Words was assembled by Amy’s parents, and it’s largely made up of youthful ephemera – letters, photographs, school reports, pages from notebooks and diaries. But it’s emphasised over and over again that Amy was a very private person (to the point of her family not hearing much of her music until it was ready to be released), and most of the material is the sort of thing she might not have wanted the world to see. I felt uncomfortable reading journal entries about which classmates Amy hated or fancied – I have loads of stuff like this in old notebooks and even now I’d be mortified if anyone else read it!

The sections that deal with Amy’s evolution as a musician and songwriter are more interesting. Here, we get to see handwritten lyrics and unfinished songs, and there’s a clear sense of how her songwriting process worked. It’s easy to read many of the lines as she might have sung them. There are some beautiful photographs too, and at the end, two stories from people who have benefitted from the services offered by the Amy Winehouse Foundation. These are lovely to read – perhaps they should have taken up a larger portion of the book?

With any person, famous or not, childhood scribblings might well provide glimpses of the adult they became, but I don’t know that they’re particularly interesting in themselves to anyone other than the person’s family. In Her Words is mostly these, and more or less cuts off at the point Amy became truly famous. It’s unclear whether this is because there’s little or no material available from those years, or just that her parents find it too painful to revisit them. As understandable as that might be, it shows the limitations of this book being curated by Amy’s family. While it was a time of great torment for Amy as an individual, that period of creative productivity and fame is, after all, the reason she is remembered, and the reason people want to read more about her in the first place.

(Also, I’d mistakenly got the impression that In Her Words was some kind of follow-on from Amy Winehouse: Beyond Black, perhaps because of the similar format and design of the books, when in fact they were produced and published separately. If you want to read one book about Amy Winehouse, Beyond Black is the far better option, and a truly gorgeous tribute.)