No.

Born in Enfield in 1983, she died nine years ago today. I wrote this the day after:

I was drinking coffee when I heard Amy Winehouse was dead. I felt tears threaten immediately, but dismissed the sudden, unexpected wave of sadness as self-indulgent nonsense that had far more to do with me and my life than with her. But I kept thinking about her. And I had a small whiskey. And another. And I kept thinking about her.

One of the exercises I've used, occasionally, when teaching mental health students, has been to put up on screen the phrase 'I feel sorry for Amy Winehouse,' and ask people to notice their immediate reactions - and talk about them. The room's usually been split into those who see her as victim - of the media, of the voraciously abusive record industry, of her family, of men, of the 'illness' of addiction - and those who see her primarily as unfortunate but somehow willing participant in her own destruction, a weak, ruined kid who no-one could have saved because she didn’t want saving. What most have usually agreed on is that, at some point, her symbiotic relationship with the press - and us - became co-dependant, parasitic, cannabilistic and blackly, bloodily destructive.

Hungover this morning - and still miserable - I found myself thinking about the superficiality of that exercise, the way in which I used 'Amy Winehouse' to make some pretty crass points, the way in which, in the unreality of those soulless, protected classrooms, we all had clear opinions, saw ourselves in her, wanted to be like her and not be like her, admired her and pitied her, dismissed her and granted her some distorted significance beyond what she either wanted or deserved. Somehow, I thought, we never actually seemed to think of her as a real fucking person, full and complex and flawed and feeling and sensing and hurting and dreaming. I found myself wondering this morning exactly why I used her, and not anyone else, as an example to hang my flimsy points about suicide, addiction and mental health on - and why I felt so upset last night.

Amy was from just down the road - fiercely, otherly attractive in the early days of her fame/infamy, strange, thrilling, difficult, tortured - and she was a bloody good singer (though I'm not about to do the usual Stalinist thing and pretend I loved all her music - some of it was too hard, too jazzy, not quite soully enough for me - but I could listen to the best of it for ever and the words she wrote could be stunningly, batteringly honest, wry, warm and shockingly insightful.)

As a strange, difficult, music-obsessed boy/man from Enfield who’d spent half his adolescence in unrequited love with tortured girls from Southgate, I had messy reasons for feeling some kind of connection with her, perhaps. But more than any of those, Amy seemed - or, rather, the avatar we all created of her in our lives seemed - to tell us so much about ourselves, to tell me so much about myself: my own weaknesses, my own desires to be heard and understood, my own self-destructiveness, my own soul and jazz. As long as Amy was around, there was someone like me, but far, far, far worse: I could feel sane, sensible, neither victim nor wilful culprit in my own life. Whatever fuck-ups I made, they were never going to be as bad as hers; and however badly I treated those around me, it would never be as bad as those who should have treated her in the ways deserved, in ways that proved they really loved her. So she was useful to me, Amy, as she was to those (often men) who are already claiming her as some kind of feminist icon, weirdly proud of her living a destructive life in popular music in the same way men have always done, as if that's equality, somehow, as if it's progress...

There was a second part to that student exercise I'd sometimes use: a second screen that had the phrase 'What I have in common with Amy Winehouse is...' Thinking about that now, I remember my own internal answers, know I too feel unable/unwilling to cope at times, feel useless, even worthless every now and then, know I use chemicals (conservatively, gently) as an avoidant prop. And I know I have responsibility for my own life, I know I'm, in part, the result of my childhood, of everything that's ever happened to me, of the friends who died when they were 27, of my genes and my biology and my chemistry and my culture. I know I too can self-mythologise, use my past, use image and projection and half-truths. I know I'm just some flawed loner from the London Borough of Enfield...

There have been so many times I've been enraged by the failure of the mental health system and ‘society’ to help people like Amy Winehouse and right now I feel enraged by my own vague complicity in her death and in that of so many others who never had her talent or 'luck'. But I'm not totally convinced the 'system' failed as such: I think one of the tragedies and sadnesses of her death is that none of us ever really recognised her as a person, merely as that avatar, as a perverse learning tool, as an exemplar, as a repository for all the stuff - good and bad - we don't want to face up to in ourselves.

So I hope Amy doesn't become another Jimi or Janis or Kurt: I hope she stays, in our hearts, the strange, tortured, joyful girl from Southgate who could sing our desires and losses like no-one else of her generation. And then maybe we can really learn from her. And give her back some of her real self.