She is the producer of the feature film FARAH GOES BANG, which she wrote with Meera Menon. Her first novel for young adults, SISTER MISCHIEF, was released by Candlewick Press in 2011, and called a “Best Book You Haven’t Read of 2011” by Vanity Fair online, as well as “a provocative, authentic coming-of-age story…full of big ideas, big heart, and big poetry” by Booklist in its starred review, and a 2012 Best of the Bay pick by the SF Bay Guardian. Laura Goode is a novelist, essayist, poet, and screenwriter living in San Francisco. The irony is tragic but uniquely hers: that Amy, who constructed her artistic identity so cleverly outside of time, who knew so much about the most intense ways to spend it, would end up being known for such a specific and brief amount. Approximately the length of just the right amount of foreplay or an unusually furious journal entry. Approximately the length of a subway ride from central Brooklyn to upper Manhattan. When I woke to the news that she’d died I thought of the poem Frank O’Hara wrote after Lana Turner died:īack to Black is a slim album to match its slim feline author: 10 original songs, two remixes (at least on the iTunes edition I have), 42 minutes. Now she’ll always be 27 and the rest of us still have to grow up. She told us flat out she wasn’t ever going to change, even though we could see the romance had left her, just like it left Janis Joplin. Like the Amy disclaimer: she cheated herself, she ain’t got the time, her daddy thinks she’s fine and life is like a pipe. We waited for the next album, and even before Saturday morning we’d probably started to know it wasn’t coming. It hurt to see the drugs and rats in the videos. Her tattoos weren’t coy when interlaced with scabs. Soon she outpaced us with the twisting and drinking and smoking.
Amy’s life was shorter, more privileged and less exploited, but you hear a heartbreak like that when she sings “we never said goodbye in words, I died a hundred times.” Hers was somewhere near that magnitude of sorrow, and we were grateful for that, too. She might’ve known nearly as much about heartbreak as Billie Holliday, although no one’s ever known as much about heartbreak as Billie. It’s always dangerous when everybody’s sleeping It’s never safe for us, not even in the evening She wrote about relationships as weaknesses, about the way it feels to know you’re not to be trusted around someone else, about the way it feels when you can’t be trusted even around yourself. We clapped each other on our backs and traded knowing crows when she sang “little carpet burn.”Īmy wasn’t all swagger and brash, though. She wrote about ex-sex,whiskey dick and smoking weed, asking “What fuckery is this?”įinally, said the rest of us twentysomething girls out to get some in the city, in an exhale of relief.
She wrote about a boyfriend noticing the rug burns on her knees she’d gotten from blowing someone else on a thick carpet. She didn’t write about wanting a boy to ask her to the dance. She was our foul-mouthed Brit-Jewish Petula Clark, our own rangy little Diana Ross, the crusty-cute Dusty Springfield you found curled up still passed out in the corner of a couch with her panties showing when you got up to pick up the cans the next morning. A girl once asked me if I wanted to watch her dance to “Fuck Me Pumps.” I said yes.Īmy was a collision of eras–not so much anachronistic as timeless–a foxy retro minx, a Fast Girl if ever the term applied. We listened to Amy while we knocked over candles dancing in dark bars and when we smoked cigarettes in our underwear out the bedroom window in the morning. We twisted, we swayed, we drank and smoked to her, like her and along with her. My best friend was Amy for Halloween she stuffed a T-shirt under her thick chestnut hair to achieve the iconic beehive’s height.
My roommate and I played it as we lined our eyes to go out in Brooklyn I played it behind the bar at the half-student, half-uptown-townie dive where I tended twice a week.
In the fall of 2007, while I was a grad student in New York, I couldn’t stop listening to Back to Black. Amy Winehouse was my contemporary-exactly my age, 27, when she was found dead at her London home on July 23.