With her oversized beehive, wing-tipped eyeliner and many tattoos, Amy Winehouse was immediately recognizable, a pop culture icon.
Beloved by fans for songs like “Rehab,” “Back to Black” and “Tears Dry on Their Own,” the singer was just 27 when she died in July 2011.
Now her family is revealing another side of the Grammy winner, the daughter and sister they knew, in a new book, Amy Winehouse: In Her Words.
The collection of never-before-seen photos, journal entries and handwritten letters and poems, will be published on Aug. 29, days before what would have been Winehouse’s 40th birthday. But her family is sharing an exclusive excerpt and rare images with PEOPLE.
“We always wanted the world to know the real Amy, where she came from and what made her tick,” her father, Mitch Winehouse, says. “In all aspects she was just a normal Jewish kid from North London, who did normal kid things, went to drama class, loved her grandma, her mum and dad, loved her brother.”
Royalties from the book will go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, the charity her family created 12 years ago on her birthday, Sept. 14, weeks after she died of accidental alcohol poisoning. With projects in the U.S., U.K. and the Caribbean, it aims to educate young people about the dangers of drugs and alcohol and to support the recovery of those who struggle with substance abuse.
Mitch, 72, hopes this book will give people “a real insight into Amy’s personality.” He says, “She was a loyal, generous friend. She’d help anybody… Just a wonderful human being who saw the best in everybody.”
Here is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s foreword, written by Winehouse’s parents, Mitch and Janis.
Many artists talk about waiting for the perfect song to drop into their lap from the heavens. For them, writing is a labor of love, but for Amy, songs seemed to fall easily. Every now and then it was as if a lightbulb went on in her head. She’d disappear to a quiet place for a while and put together a few chords. A song would emerge, then a whole album. “How do you do it? Do you write the melodies or the lyrics first?” Mitch asked her one day. “Oh, come on, Dad! Everyone can do it!” she laughed. Except everyone couldn’t. That was Amy — she had very little understanding of just how brilliant she was. Famously in one interview, she said of Janis: “I thought everyone could sing, until I heard my mum.”
It wasn’t until after Amy’s passing, when we started sifting through her writings and drawings collected from her early childhood, that we started to understand more of how, behind that casual attitude, Amy had been carefully honing her talent for years.
The joy of reading through all of Amy’s work now always lightens the devastation of losing her. 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. That said, reading through it we can’t say that we truly understand her either. Whether or not writing or composing became cathartic for Amy we don’t know for sure, but it was certainly a creative process that she came back to time and again in her happiest periods, as well as in her darkest moments of addiction.
Amy was a girl who absorbed any information spinning around her, but little of it had to do with her lessons. From the outset, we realized that school was probably never going to fulfill Amy. “I’m bored,” was a phrase she often repeated. Teachers told us she was bright and capable, yet there was always a “but.” But … she couldn’t sit still, or she couldn’t concentrate, or she misbehaved in class. Instead, Amy devoured films, musicals, novels and poetry, or took inspiration from our family life in North London or the twists and turns of her many friendships.
Music also seeped effortlessly into Amy’s consciousness and she could recite lyrics and sing tunes after hearing a song maybe just once or twice. At her nan Cynthia’s house she was surrounded by jazz music: anyone from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald to Sarah Vaughan. And at home she performed songs from the musical Mary Poppins or Jewish hymns that we’d taught her. She repeated one hymn, “Ma’oz Tzur,” over and over until she got it right. “Okay, Amy. Enough,” was a familiar expression in our house as she sang continuously at the top of her voice.
Amy made lists for everything: what she wanted to buy for her room or, perhaps more accurately, what we or her grandparents were going to buy for her. She listed every item, the shop where it could be bought from and its cost, all neatly totaled up at the end. Then she drew plans of where those items would go in her room. Just reading through Amy’s shopping lists have us in stitches. Who can make a shopping list funny? Only Amy could.
Her most famous hit, “Rehab,” was written after a conversation she had with Mitch, most likely scribbled down in a notebook. She’d arrived at Mitch’s home with her then-managers Nick Godwyn and Nick Shymansky. Both had been concerned about her drinking and wanted to take her for professional treatment. “I don’t want to go, Dad. I haven’t got ninety days!” she told Mitch. Several years later, that conversation got filtered through Amy’s creative lens, chopped up and rearranged to become a number one hit. She would also lift excerpts from one song and move them into another to create new stories — a constant process of editing out, moving lines around, writing and rewriting. Some lines would make the final cut, but much of what she wrote stayed in her notebooks, perhaps to be used at a later date.
What’s sad for us is that we’ll never hear the songs that Amy may have produced in the years to follow. Certainly, in the four years from Back to Black’s release until her passing, Amy was never well enough to write another complete album, nor was she able to move on with her life in the way that she may have done before. It’s now bittersweet for us to look back on a diary entry that Amy wrote when she was a teenager: “Mostly I have this dream to be very famous, to work on stage. It’s a lifelong ambition. I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes … I want to be remembered for being … just me.”
Yet when fame did happen, celebrity robbed Amy of any privacy she might have wished for. Instead of being herself, her trademark beehive became an identity to hide behind. Even with the paparazzi following her often 24 hours a day, she shrugged off the pressure, but she also knew she could never go back to the person she was. Yet it was always in those moments on her own in her room that some of her best work would materialize, just as it did throughout her childhood.
