Amy Winehouse’s Dad Pens New Memoir, Says Losing Her Was ‘Worse Than Awful’

It’s been nearly a year since Amy Winehouse’s dad learned that while he was in New York on business, his daughter had died alone in her London home.

Amy Winehouse’s dad Mitch was forced to make the long transatlantic trip back knowing he was returning to a country where the biggest news was his daughter’s death, and he speaks of a trip that literally sounds like the worst nightmare of any parent.

Nearly a year after Amy’s death came as a shock but perhaps not a surprise, Mitch Winehouse has written a memoir about his daughter. And while the sequence of events involving Amy Winehouse’s dad immediately following her death was widely reported at the time, Mitch has opened up about what the trip felt like, and says:

“Coming back on the plane, it was awful. It was dreadful. I had my manager Trenton with me, and Amy’s manager Raye. They were very upset, but I was… I was OK. I was obviously in shock. And all I kept thinking of was the foundation. Although I was OK coming on the flight from America, I thought to myself, I’m actually going insane. I’m actually losing my mind. I could feel myself slipping away.”

Strangely, though, Amy Winehouse’s dad said it was something that might have set other celebrity parents over the edge in a similar situation — a massive throng of mourners — that actually helped him get through the worst of it in the hours and days after his daughter’s death at the age of 27.

Amy Winehouse’s dad continues:

“And then, the minute I stepped off the plane and went to her house and there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, I got a sense of how I could deal with it, how I could overcome this.”

Of Amy’s charity, her father explains it kept him sane in the long-term after losing her:

“It’s saved my life. It’s saved my life. Nobody should know what it feels like to lose a child. I lost my dad when I was 16; he was 43. We were very close. But losing a parent is not like losing a child. It’s worse than awful. But the more I spoke to people about the charity, about helping people, especially people Amy would have wanted to help, it became my lifeline, so to speak.”

The book Amy Winehouse’s dad wrote to fund her charity, Amy: My Daughter,