Rehab Ghosts Smoke Cigarettes

Our Sunday paid subscriber roundup featuring Amy Winehouse, (the wrong) Jason Brown, Louise Glück and more.

A fun fact about Amy Winehouse is that she actually went to rehab four times, which sounds like I’m dad-joking here, but that’s one of the many parts I’ll never forget from that Leslie Jamison essay “Confessions of an Unredeemed Fan.” I return to read this one in particular when I need a “good rehab essay” to turn me on whenever I write about my own rehab experience.

What I love about Jamison's essay is how she toggles between being an admitted hardcore over-protective super fan to a cold-hearted, sobering—sober—journalist who is forced by this assignment to examine the bleakest, more upsetting moments of Amy Winehouse’s public suffering.

After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”

A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”

I still keep in touch with a few of my fellow HARP recovery center graduates, and it’s always very centering to hear from them because, as much as I sometimes reduce them to characters in the dramatic retelling of My Big Recovery Story, they are all human, just like me, whose lives were disrupted and destroyed by addiction, and some of them never made it back.

“Hey AJ, i hope you're doing ok bro. I wanted to reach out & say hello after clicking on my Facebook birthdays for today, and learning that two more people that I met in treatment/sober house have passed away in the last couple of years. One of which was Patti [Redacted]. She was in HARP with us. I can't recall if you were especially friendly with her, but I'm sure you may remember her. Looks like she passed sometime during the pandemic. I'm really fucking sad these days bro. People are dropping something extra, and it doesn't even all seem to be OD's….”

I did know Patti. She was one of my besties at HARP, actually.