Since Whitney Houston’s death in 2012, a flurry of books and documentaries have appeared, most of them presenting her life as a cautionary tale. In this new biography, Emily Lordi, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, refuses to reduce Houston’s story to another “good girl gone bad” narrative. Instead she presents a pluralistic take on her life in which Houston’s queerness, drug use and eccentricities are not dismissed as aberrations (as they were in her lifetime) but rather seen in the wider context of her unique talent and the pressures placed on her to embody black excellence.
Lordi describes the unsteady building blocks of Houston’s family (her mother Cissy’s band The Sweet Inspirations were in-demand session musicians who worked with Elvis, as well as on Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man). When Cissy was still a child, Houston’s grandmother had a debilitating stroke following a miscarriage, eventually succumbing to a cerebral haemorrhage during a later pregnancy. The response to this trauma was to bury it. As Lordi writes: “Here was a lesson in suppressing your feelings and getting on with it.” But in a book where the act of singing through the pain is invoked multiple times, it is striking that reports Houston was molested as a child (a pivotal part of Kevin Macdonald’s 2018 documentary, which drew a line between that and her addictions) are not discussed.
