READER'S DIGEST RECOMMENDED READ: Remembering Amy

Tyler James, who lived with Amy Winehouse for many years, recounts how the media hounded his best friend

- Nancy Mitford

TYLER JAMES MET Amy Winehouse at the Sylvia Young Theatre School when she was 12 and he was 13 [see sidebar on next page]. They remained loving friends for the rest of her life, living together platonically for the last nine years of it. At first, it was the more ambitious Tyler who seemed likely to become the pop star. But once he’d badgered Amy into making a demo tape—and his manager into listening to it—her career never looked back, while his faltered.

By their early twenties both were committed hedonists, and Tyler is uncomfortably good on how much fun drink and drugs can be—until they’re not. Eventually he managed to quit the booze and cocaine, but had less success with Amy’s many addictions. Three years before her death in 2011, aged 27, she did give up the heroin and crack she’d been encouraged to take by her abusive boyfriend—and later husband—Blake Fielder-Civil. After that, though, her drinking, bulimia and self-harm all grew a lot worse, not helped by Blake’s 2008 imprisonment for GBH.

Tyler’s powerfully vivid (and quite sweary) eye-witness account takes us unsparingly through Amy’s decline, but always with obvious sympathy, as well as an understandable respect for her astonishing talent. At the same time, he doesn’t hide how exasperating she could be.

In the end, the thing he blames most for destroying her is fame. Following the release of her all-conquering album Back to Black she was faced with a level of global stardom for which she was completely unsuited. But there was also the horrible relish that the media (and public) took in her meltdowns: something Tyler first saw in 2008…