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Photo illustration by Coda. Photo by Michael Zagaris/Getty Images.
The strangest thing about writing a book is putting it out into the world. These were words that lived in your head and in various states on your computer for years—seen only by you, the editor ushering you through it and whoever you’ve asked to give it a read. And now it’s out. It's on shelves. It's in people’s homes and on their tablets. Pieces of it are excerpted on the Internet. A voice actor narrated it for the audiobook. It’s no longer yours in the sense that you’d known it before pub day.
For the last two years I’d been anxious about the day Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston would be released. Not because I wasn’t ready to release it from the confines of my brain and the collection of Word documents that comprised the manuscript, but because this was a book that I actually couldn’t wait to release into the world. It was a book I wrote for the world, that I believed the world needed.
Didn’t We Almost Have It All arrives just as we’re approaching ten years without Whitney here with us. And the book is as much a reflection of who we’ve become, culturally, over the last decade as it is about reexamining Whitney’s life and career. In the week since it’s been out I’ve been asked a lot about why I believed it was necessary to reflect on the past—or write about someone as unknowable as Whitney. I think the limited scope of how we see Whitney—by solely reading her through the tragedies or career triumphs that defined her superstardom—does her such a disservice. There were so many barriers eviscerated by the beauty and the majesty of her voice and the success she found, but chipping away at all those cultural barriers came with a mighty cost. And I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore our judgement and our shame and how that made us miss so very much about Whitney when we had her with us. How it stopped us from seeing her for the complicated woman she was.
Between Framing Britney Spears and #JusticeForJanet and television projects inspired by Monica Lewinsky and Pamela Anderson, we’ve been in the midst of a great cultural reckoning around the ways in which we’ve treated celebrity women when they face controversy. Didn’t We Almost Have It All came from a place of wanting to usher us towards a deeper reflection on all of what ultimately undid Whitney. Yes, she carried the weight of her own vices but she also carried the burden of our our judgement and our shame—and there's no way to look at her story, and our role in it, and not consider the ways in which she was a victim of the times.
As we mark a decade without Whitney Houston, I know there’s going to be a fair amount of attention on reliving her last days or finding meaning from her darkest hours. But I also hope there’s reflection on all that we lost with her, and all that we’ve gained since. And I hope there’s celebration of what she left us. This book was born out of the grief that we’ll never know what could have been if only we had treated Whitney with more kindness or offered her compassion over ridicule. We’ll never know what she would have done. Who she would have become. The music she would have given us. The films she would have done. The stories she would have told us, when she was ready. We'll never really know what could have been. But didn't we almost have it all?
Photo illustration by Coda. Photo by JOCE/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images.
In case you missed it, I wrote about Kanye West and the Art of Controlling the Narrative. Quite a lot has happened in the chronicles of Ye, but I'm far too tired to unpack the last three weeks of the same cycle he's had us on. And I know you are too.
On second thought, maybe Don't Look Up should win best picture. Granted I have no real horse in the race and have only seen three of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture (with zero interest in seeing the other seven), but wouldn't it be a shock to the only film we all bothered to watch actually take the prize? I know, I know. I'm applying Billboard Music Award rules to the Oscars ... but aren't we all tired of pretending like we're going to power through half a dozen films we heard about a week ago. Your film snob friend is still going to judge you for seeing House of Gucci and not having a hot take on Licorice Pizza. You're not going to find the time to watch Belfast or The Power of the Dog and you know it. I mean, come on, you may have only found yourself here because you were on Google trying to figure out what the fuck Coda is about.
