Saving Amy Read Online Free

them ready for school. I took them to school. … I came back from work to pick them up from school. … I wouldn’t leave them alone. I wanted to be with them all the time. … I was at the house all the time and Janis had to say to me, “We are divorced; you really aren’t meant to be here.” In a nice way. We were trying to get over the fact that we were divorced, which was difficult for her more than me because I had Jane and it wasn’t appropriate for me to be there all the time.’
    Mitch, at one point during our early interviews, says that Amy’s brother, Alex, suffered from depression for three years. He adds, ‘Looking back Amy wasn’t affected because she knew Jane from when Amy was two. She has known Jane her whole life. Alex knew Jane from when he was six. I thought it was Alex who was more affected by our breakup but clearly Alex has got over it. Alex is fine. … When we split up, Alex was older.’
    When I first meet Janis in London, I get the chance to ask if she thinks Amy’s troubles began with her divorce from Mitch. ‘No, no, no,’ she denies. ‘I am very much a person of – it was life’s experience – and that’s it. We go through life and we experience it in our way.’
    Yet, when I am with Amy in St Lucia months later, it occurs to me that, while there might not be a rift betweenJanis and Mitch, Amy still behaves like that 9-year-old kid, trying to grab her parents’ attention. She needs it – craves it.
    I ask Janis what her wish was for Amy and Alex when they were growing up. ‘For them to be happy and do what is best for them. And, that’s all I wanted for them. And they are both, both very, very talented. They are probably equally talented.’
    Janis continues: ‘Mitchell and I always joke about Alex and Amy and Mitchell would always say “Alex, we adopted you” and Alex would be like “What! What! What! What!” – because that was the joke on them. And it would always be that either Alex was adopted or Amy was adopted. Just to throw them off-key.’
    On the occasions that Janis and I meet or speak over the next months, it occurs to me that she continually drops ‘Mitchell and I’ into the conversation, in the way you would do if you were a couple. Although Janis is a woman who was abandoned by her husband and the father of her two children for another woman (about whom Janis had known for quite some time, as had Amy and Alex, from the ages of two and six respectively), in her mind she and Mitch are still a couple, still united.
    When it comes to Amy, Jane is only the other woman and can’t compete. Janis and Mitch are Amy’s parents – Jane simply doesn’t enter into the equation.

    After Janis and Mitch split up, Janis moved with Alex and Amy to a house in East Finchley, another Jewishdominated area in North London. Amy is reported to havesaid that growing up there was ‘cool’, but it must have been very different to the life that she and her brother had had until then.
    Janis recalls that Amy missed Mitch not being around and that this might be why there is a lot of anger in her songs. Mitch’s treatment of Janis and his affair with Jane is certainly something Amy deals with in her song ‘What Is It About Men’.
    Aged 11, Amy moved to Ashmole Secondary School in Southgate, along with her friend, Juliette, where her musical tastes began to change and broaden. She listened to jazz, the music that Mitch liked so much and her uncles played, and sang along to artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, a singer who inspired Amy to realize that a ‘whisper can be so much more effective than just belting something out.’
    Amy performed in amateur youth plays and school productions, sometimes more successfully than others, as Mitch noted in an early discussion. Recalling when he and Jane went to see a 12-year-old Amy sing at school, he commented, ‘She sang this song … and I said to Jane “Well, thank God she can have a career as an actress.” And the next