The music was written by Johnny Marr in an hour in a New York hotel room on 2 January 1984, using a red Gibson ES-355 guitar that was bought for him that day by Seymour Stein.

"[1] Although not contacted for the subsequent recording "William, It Was Really Nothing", Street was asked to engineer the Smiths' next album, Meat Is Murder, with Morrissey and Marr producing for the first time.

[1] The cover features Viv Nicholson, who became famous in 1961 in the UK for winning a large amount of money on the football pools and then rapidly squandering it.

Journalist Andrew Collins borrowed the song's title for the name of his autobiographical book Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: My Difficult Student 80s, published in 2004.

Hopkins's character Mildred Watson Drake is a successful author who writes a novel titled Girl Afraid.