With a voice and a look that had people calling her the "Prom Queen of Soul," Whitney Houston swept a generation.

But that success and that image came at a cost, forcing Houston to minimize a lot of things about herself and leading to a lot of ridicule — and also to a tragic end. In the new book "Didn't We Almost Have It All?" music critic Gerrick Kennedy examines Houston's legacy and how American culture has evolved in the time since her death.

In an interview for "LA Times Today," Kennedy explained his relationship to Houston's story.

"Didn't We Almost Have it All?" is a profound cultural meditation, but there's also a personal touch, including the time that Kennedy met Whitney on assignment for the Los Angeles Times.

"I was reporting on the Clive Gala and there was a rehearsal for the headliners," Kennedy said. "I saw Whitney Houston across the stage. She was wet from the pool. She was erratic in her movements. Her outfit was really disheveled. It was really clear that something was going on. But there was also this moment with her outside of the Hilton. And it was clear that she was obviously struggling that day, but there was a kindness in her. I think it was mostly because she saw a group of Black reporters that were the only ones who were not laughing, not pointing, not trying to take video with our phones. I believe she really appreciated that. When she saw me outside, she tapped me on the shoulder. We had this small conversation where I essentially unloaded all my years of loving her and her music and wanting the best for her. But I could see a sadness and she held my hand and she said, 'Oh, bless you.'"

Two days later, in that very hotel, Whitney Houston was found dead. Ten years later, Kennedy has written his book about Houston. Kennedy explained how the book's subtitle, "In Defense of Whitney Houston," shows that she is more than her accomplishments and the tragedy she experienced.

"I just thought that the fullness of who she was, the complexity of who she was, and also who we didn't allow her to be was something that I wanted to explore. This is me trying to tell the world that we didn't do right by this person when they were here with us. We weren't kind to them in ways that we are now with celebrities. We're much more compassionate when they have struggles and when they make mistakes, frankly. The idea that I wanted to get across to was this is a person that we will never know. We will never know who Whitney Houston was. And I wanted to write something that spoke to that. But I also think that means I have to defend it because so much of what we've done over the years is to try to figure out who this person was."

Houston's roots and childhood years are also explored in the book.

"If you think of all of this greatness that she has surrounding her and her family, you know, there's nothing else for her to do other than share that gift," said Kennedy. "But I also wanted to explore Whitney, growing up as a young Black woman in the 1970s and 1980s in Newark before we met her. We had met a person who had lived a full life that we didn't really get to appreciate because she was packaged in a way that was palatable for everybody, which was kind of shrinking some of the blackness and shrinking which came from that option. Before we ever met Whitney, she'd been tied to drugs and had done things that many teenagers do. It wasn't that groundbreaking that she had had experimentation with drugs or experimenting with a friend or any of these things that we then started to judge her for."

In Kennedy's book, he explores how shame permeated Houston's life and legacy. Kennedy said it was hard for him to read the way the press wrote about Houston during her life.

"I did have a really challenging time," said Kennedy. "I'm reading the ways in which she was written about because to me, that was also adding shame. Because she was a Black woman who came from the church, we expected her to sing a particular kind of way. When she didn't do that, we judged her for it because she was a woman that came from a certain kind of family. We then questioned why she sang the song she sang, why she picked the song that she wanted to sing. There was a way in which we stripped her own autonomy, because we said, there's no way that you're making these decisions because we know that you're this Black girl from the hood. So we did this thing where we projected our own shame onto her. And we know the ending. It was, of course, tragic."

A big part of the book focuses on how our culture has evolved since the start of Houston's career. Kennedy pondered how Houston would have fared if she had come into the spotlight today.

"I think that there would have been a lot more compassion for Whitney," he said. "She was met with so much aggression toward these things that she didn't want to talk about. She didn't want to talk about her personal life. There are interviews where you can see the anger from reporters, and it's something that obviously we would never do now. But there was so much of this. There just was a culture of not just how the media works, but also how we consumed the media. This level of questioning that she was always faced with that was also rooted in a level of aggression because again, it was her shame. So, there was just no other way to write about those things without calling it what it was. I see it in the ways that we talk about Britney Spears, the ways that we talk about Janet Jackson. I think there's the thing that's happening where we are holding ourselves accountable. And so much of that is because we've lost people. We had to sort of start to rethink the ways that we treat people when they have any level of struggle. And there is way more compassion and empathy that we had in previous years. I think she would have at least had some more time."

"Didn't We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston" is available in bookstores now.

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