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It’s a grotesque insult for Back to Black to suggest Amy Winehouse died of heartache over her childlessness | Laura Snapes

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic suggests that the singer’s desire for a baby was the main source of her suffering. It’s a gendered simplification that exonerates the forces that killed her

The film suggests that promoter turned manager Raye Cosbert put a barely conscious Winehouse on a plane taking her to her disastrous final date in Belgrade in June 2011, a month prior to her death from alcohol poisoning. The notion that two drug addicts who were in the state of the real-life couple could be actively trying to have a baby stretches belief; not to mention the fact that Winehouse’s bulimia – clumsily telegraphed by scenes of her eating cake one minute, then exiting the bathroom the next – would probably have stopped her periods, making it impossible to conceive at such a low body weight. Here is one of the greatest artists of the 21st century, who wrote such sexual, bawdy, lacerating songs about womanhood, being sanitised by a narrative of legible female pain: never mind trying to make sense of all that messy business, let us soothe our consciences with the banality of her craving a baby.

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