This Archive Is For You If You Need It

[This is a paper I wrote for a literature class of mine, in which I put Amy Winehouse’s debut album Frank and Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In The Dream House in conversation with one another through the lens of archive.]

By interrogating Amy Winehouse’s 2003 debut album Frank through the lens of a personal archive, connections can be found within Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In The Dream House. Both texts are largely, if not entirely, autobiographical, and blend the boundaries of genre within their respective mediums, displaying bursts of creative prowess and control over the author’s own narrative. Themes of repetition, acknowledged ignorance, and the role of the author appear within each text, which feed into the ways the works can be understood as an archive. In this sense the archive is a culmination of personal lived experience and the meticulous grappling of that experience through writing, ultimately resulting in a body of work that reflects the individual but can transcend their sole relationship to it. Through an examination of Frank as a personal archive to myself, and then the ways in which In the Dream House illuminates Winehouse’s album through shared themes and the hybridity of genre, an understanding can be unearthed.

So, what is it about Frank that allows this author to identify it as a sort of personal archive despite being the product of a permanent stranger? For starters, Winehouse and I are both 5’3’ Russian Jewish women whose parents split in their middle school years from our father’s affair, and who turned to writing as an attempt to understand complex adult relationships. It is impossible to say if these coincidental biographical similarities are the reason I am drawn to her lyrics so strongly, or if I find a kinship in her writing voice separate from these developmental parallels. I was taken to Winehouse before her death, for I remember the moment I heard the news, making me around ten-years-old. Of course, at this time my fondness for her didn’t extend much beyond the allure of her seductive winged-eyeliner in the Back to Black liner notes and the captivating quality of her voice. Surely I didn’t understand half of what she describes in “You Know I’m No Good.” In the last decade since, however, I felt as though I have grown up with Winehouse as a sort of ghostly older sister, as each time I have revisited her work over the years I found more and more of myself tucked within the verses, for better or for worse. I now am the same age as Winehouse was when Frank was released and the flame of this one-sided relationship has yet to dim. Despite only having two officially released albums, and one posthumously, there are still songs or lyrics that are renewed with fresh meaning as I continue to gain life experience. It goes without saying there are many experiences of Winehouse’s I hope to never endure, and many elements of her biography are not lost on me as cautionary tales. That being said, I hope in the next decade since her passing, her legacy can transcend the reductive “victim” label and instead focus on the music she did give the world, and the ways she continues to influence the unorthodox pop stars of today. I do not know if Winehouse would have been seen as such a lingering wonder if she had lived past thirty, but I do know her memory is with me always.

Frank is the lesser known of Winehouse’s two released albums that preceded her death, though in many ways it is a much more concentrated and raw reflection of herself than the celebrated Back to Black. Frank came out when Winehouse was just twenty-years-old, despite much of the subject matter seeming to demand the maturity of someone years older. From the album’s start the speaker is depicted rolling her eyes in boredom at a much older lover in the somewhat offensive “Stronger Than Me,” before quickly taking a shameful blow of rejection in “You Sent Me Flying.” Time and time again the speaker gets caught in this cycle of one who is restless in love: complete control that shifts into crushing uncertainty out of a desire for thrill. The song that illuminates this dilemma best on the album is “What Is It About Men,” a three-and-a-half minute interrogation of the self that questions bad decision making in the face of the knowledge of one’s own patterns. The song begins, “Understand, once he was a family man/ So surely I would never, ever go through it firsthand/ Emulate all the shit my mother hated/ I can’t help but demonstrate my Freudian fate.” This intro is a direct reference to Winehouse’s father who cheated on her mother, and because of whom Winehouse now feels predisposed to repeat similar destructive relationship behaviors. The chorus goes onto express the frustrations of this personal dilemma, as Winehouse sings, “It’s bricked up in my head, it’s shoved under my bed/ And I question myself again, “What is it ‘bout men?”/ Now my destructive side has grown a mile wide/ And I question myself again, “What is it ‘bout men?” In this song, Winehouse displays a knowledge of her own harmful behavior, and a sort of addiction or inability to break away from noxious dynamics, yet she continuously falls privy to them, emphasized in the repetition of the song’s title and the word “again.” In the song “Amy, Amy, Amy” these same themes are reiterated, as the title serves as a reprimand or exhaustion with one’s own behavior, but at the same time she makes no attempt at stopping it. The chorus of the song is “Although I’ve been here before/ He’s just too hard to ignore,” while a chorus of her name fills the empty spaces, like the amused scolding of a child. Key to the speaker’s relationship dilemma is the awareness of her flawed approach and moral shortcomings, and the continual repetition of them nonetheless, as there seems to be a fundamental inability to do what is best for her.

The notion of being unable to do the more difficult, but undoubtedly beneficial thing for oneself is perhaps the undercurrent of Machado’s In the Dream House. A primary difference between the speaker of Frank and that of In the Dream House is that the speaker of the latter does not possess any element of control in their relationship, and instead is at the mercy of her partner, “The Woman in the Dream House,” at all times. There are no moments of arrogant dominance while in the Dream House, rather just abuse and psychological warfare that takes the speaker years to break away from. Even then it is her who is being rejected and left by the woman for someone else, for in the ugliest relationship of the speaker’s life she is still the one who gets dumped. This is not to shame the speaker or imply one can see clearly in manipulative relationships, but rather her lack of autonomy emphasizes the difficulty of doing what’s best for oneself without the gift of objective scrutiny. In “Traumhaus as Lipogram,” Machado writes, “Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go/ Why didn’t you run/ Why didn’t you say? (Also: Why did you stay?) I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison” (149). This section is titled after a sense of loss, directly relating to “lipogram,” which is when an author omits a letter or letters from the alphabet in a composition, and by “traumhaus,” which means “house of dreams” in German, and replaces “Dream House,” which is the phrase that opens every other section in the memoir. This micro-chapter is an attempt for the speaker to convey the sheer difficulty of explaining and leaving an abusive relationship, the poison being a metaphor for the manipulation and control of her girlfriend. The phrase “but I fail and fail and fail” emphasizes the repetition of being unable to communicate the difficulty of the relationship, just like the repeated acknowledgement of the relationship’s toxicity and subsequent inability to leave it. Similarly, there are three sections in the novel titled “Dream House as Deja Vu,” which is Machado’s acknowledgement of cycle and repeating behaviors, for even the sentences recall each other in these few sections. This authorial choice calls attention to the role of pattern, which of course is echoed in the ebb and flow of warmth and violence in their relationship. Just like how Winehouse continues to ask herself the same questions about her behaviors, Machado’s speaker is also trapped in a cycle she cannot conquer, and instead is left floundering in the muck of what she wishes she could change.

A primary way Frank and In the Dream House are representative of archive is through the acknowledgement of writing as an act of preservation and understanding, as well as how the process of writing is altered by experience. Across Frank Winehouse directly references the act of writing in a meta way that emphasizes how personal the album is, not just through the narrative reflections of her life, but through her process of dealing with these experiences as well. On “You Sent Me Flying,” she writes, “Maybe if I get this down, I’ll get it off my mind,” and

on “Amy, Amy, Amy,” “It takes me half an hour to write a verse,” and “Creative energy abused/ All my lyrics go unused.” By bringing to light how she copes with and filters experience through the lens of a writer, Winehouse blends the roles of author and archivist in determining her own narrative. This notion of the author and archivist relationship finds itself reminiscent of the role of the memoirist, as Machado writes in “Dream House as Prologue,” “Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant…They put themselves, and others, into necessary context” (5). Winehouse embodies this quote by calling attention to how the relationships described across the album are portrayed from her perspective, and through the act of writing meaning can be found, specifically in how these experiences inform the self. Machado does the same in “Dream House as Exercise in Style,” where she describes her writing technique during her time with the woman, saying, “You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will be able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before” (148). In this section Machado’s speaker is referring to the ways she is playing with different narratives and ideas through the manipulation of structure, attempting to find new meaning through a controlled destruction. Winehouse echoes this notion in how she approaches relationships, recording her findings by way of song rather than a creative writing piece. “Dream House as Exercise in Style” ends with Machado writing, “You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do” (148). Machado, like Winehouse, refers to how writing often exists in direct correlation with experience, for the ways the two preserve their feelings are often a reflection of those difficulties at the time. For Winehouse this is shown in how the distraction of another slows her writing process or how it renders her entirely useless, leaving her unable to sing the words she has written. Machado, on the other hand, is controlling her stories with the same control her partner is exerting onto her, showing how writing preserves experience not just through narrative content, but through style and structure as well.

A primary way In the Dream House and Frank are compelling works is through their blending of genre, a choice that is made not just for aesthetic purposes, but rather to more effectively compose each author’s archive as a reflection of themself. In “Dream House as Prologue,” Machado writes, “They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat” (5). In this quote Machado is writing about the role of a memoirist and how they at once must blend a number of conflicting factors in order to successfully tell a story, even if the story is from their perspective. Machado embodies this sentiment in how In the Dream House is a hybrid text, blending memoir, theory, literary criticism, and various other forms of creative writing in a way that at times disorients the reader, but ultimately creates an embodied archive that transcends traditional narrative structure. As a result, the reader can understand how Machado’s speaker felt during this period not just through Machado’s words but through the texts she was consuming at the time, and those she turned to in her reflection of the relationship, informing her experiences with words she did not alone possess. The words and ideas of other authors (Jacques Derrida, José Esteban Muñoz, Stitch Thompson, Diane Waldman, and many others) that Machado chooses to include in her memoir are crucial to her archive, for she is a culmination of all those that she identifies with, blurring the lines of what is personal. The same way I identify with Winehouse’s work, Machado does with those she chooses to speak in tandem with her own experiences, and includes these sources in her memoir as a way to more fully flesh out her archive, as well as push the boundaries of memoir as a genre. Winehouse does the same on Frank by refusing to stick to one musical style, for Frank can be defined as a hybrid of jazz, R&B, soul, hip hop, and bossa nova. In this way, Winehouse colors the various experiences and relationships she sings about through differing genres, or a blend of several at once, like how Machado writes, “smash them into a ball, roll them flat.” This notion of hybridity adds to the interpretation of Frank as an archive, for like Machado, Winehouse distorts traditional genre as a way to more effectively tell her story, as well as acknowledge the influences that are intrinsic to her personhood. Winehouse cites

several musicians across Frank in the same way Machado includes different writers in In the Dream House, showing how those that inspire are crucial to one’s archive. For starter’s the album’s name is an ode to Frank Sinatra, who she also references in “Take the Box,” Sarah Vaughn is mentioned several times in “October Song,” who Winehouse credits as one of the voices that taught her to sing, and the saxophonist Vincent Henry is in “Moody’s Mood for Love/ Teo Licks.” “Moody’s Mood for Love” is a James Moody song from 1952, which Winehouse slightly alters, in addition to her cover of the 1930s jazz classic “(There Is) No Greater Love,” which is also on the album. By including several direct references to musicians that influence her, as well as covers of previously released songs that she is attached to, Winehouse shows how archive is not just one’s own experiences and livelihood, but those of others with whom she identifies. Winehouse and Machado both display how one’s influences are crucial in telling their stories as complex beings, and by blending and pushing the boundaries of genre, this complexity is synthesized into one embodied archive.

By interrogating Winehouse’s Frank as a personal archive, and then putting it in conversation with Machado’s In the Dream House, distinct similarities can be found. For starters, the speakers have a distinct inability in doing the thing that is best for them despite knowing their actions are perpetuating harm in their lives. As Machado writes in “Dream House as Public Relations, “In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail” (228). Both Machado and Winehouse expose their shortcomings and flawed natures through their writing, at times even making direct references to the practice of writing as a reflection of their experiences and pain. Writing allows both women to better understand their behaviors and trauma, and sometimes reflects their experiences directly through style and structure, which is why writing as an act becomes cemented in each of their archives. Finally, both Winehouse and Machado experiment with genre in their texts, blending multiple as a way to expose the culmination of influences that create the person behind the autobiographical text. In this way the writers are also freed from the restrictions of traditional genre, allowing them to tell their stories with more accuracy and innovation, as In the Dream House is not simply a memoir, or Frank a R&B record. Instead the texts are a reflection of each woman’s experiences through the lens of hybridity and influences who are integral to their existence. In this way, In the Dream House and Frank are established as archives, not just to Machado and Winehouse, but to anyone who finds themselves tucked within their words.