Amy Herself

Yes, we all want Amy Winehouse to eat something. Preferably several helpings of shepherd’s pie, a double order of damp chips and several sandwiches from her local Spar.

We also think she should kick Blake Incarcerated to the floor.

We hope that she survives the notion that artistic genius must inevitably cohabit with madness, addiction and self-destruction.

We have right here, in fact, a commenter of note who disproves that notion.

But most of us were once 20-somethings gone bad. I have a “friend” who spent several years acting out every witless overindulgence known to man. Amy cuts, drinks, is said to purge and indulges in low-rent chemicals. My friend rarely ate, drank copiously and enjoyed a brief but memorable affair with a high-rent powder.

At the end of it all, she weighed 83 pounds and had grown weary of too many thoroughly unmemorable boys, friends and flats. There was an abiding sense of ennui, a weariness of puerile drama and an easy conclusion that it had all grown quite old.

Almost everyone I know, all grown up, has murmured the words “I don’t know how I made it out alive.”

The reward for having survived is that one can do it all over again, when the opportunity presents, but with a pinch more wisdom if not discretion.

I don’t really know if “interventions,” familial devotion or rehab are of much use, despite the tabloid wisdom. I do know they would have been wasted on my friend. She didn’t give a whit – and still does not – about other people’s assessments of her, her choices, her circumstances. She only trusts her own, even when she chooses to ignore them.

So, in the best of all possible worlds, I do hope Amy Herself comes to that end.