I see her stumble onto the stage, and sit down with her back to the cheering crowd while she pulls off her high heels. I see her face, tired and empty as she turns to a mic but doesn’t start singing, even as the music blares out and waits for her response. The screams and whistles turn to jeers as she stands before them, a skeletal girl with big hair and a shiny gold dress who refuses to give them even the smallest part of her. This is the point from which I can see the rest of her life. From here, I can trace the path to her ending-a red body bag shoved into an ambulance.

Walking into the theater, I had no more than a vague idea of who Amy Winehouse had been. The ‘Rehab’ girl– a bold, loud-mouthed drug addict. The documentary did not reject my assumption. However, it also revealed a vulnerable, emotionally unstable human being. She was plagued by mental illness and drug addiction, and seeing it from such a personal point of view made the media’s mocking response to her problems despicable. At the same time, seeing the addiction destroy her was frustrating and painful. When Amy finally got clean and won her Grammy, an event that should have been one of the most exciting of her entire career, she turned to her friend and told her “This is so boring without drugs”. The singer began showing up to concerts too high or drunk to perform. Her behavior was blatantly self-destructive, and her end was sadly predictable: her heart stopped after drinking too much alcohol.

But I don’t view this as her personal failure. Not only was she in the grip of addiction, but she unfortunately did not have someone to help her through it– to say ‘no’ for her, to be the willpower that serious addiction takes from a person. She was a victim of the misguided belief that addicts’ recovery should be their own responsibility and their suffering is their own fault, without even considering what drove them to drugs to begin with.