In 2004, not lengthy after her wildly profitable Onyx Lodge Tour and her marriage to Kevin Federline, Britney Spears wrote a letter on her web site. The pop icon, then on the peak of her fame, introduced that she can be taking some much-needed time without work.
In her new memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears recollects that again then, she wrote to her followers that she’d “really realized to say ‘NO!’” However that energy had already come at a value. “With this newly discovered freedom,” Spears wrote, “it’s like folks don’t know the way to act round me. … Going and going and going is all I’ve ever identified since I used to be fifteen years outdated.”
Going and going and going could be one of the simplest ways to explain the way it feels to learn The Girl in Me—a dizzying tell-all that captures the surreal tempo of Spears’ life whereas additionally (someway) stringing all that curlicued surreality into one coherent narrative.
Her biography careens throughout the web page from one unbelievable expertise after one other—a small, secure glimpse at how incomprehensible her coming-of-age would have been. In context, the weird and terrifying factors in her private historical past begin to make good sense. However because the media as soon as once more picks over the singer’s life for any morsels of reports it might probably discover, it’s laborious not to wonder if the loud, salacious headlines will overshadow her broader message.
Spears’s story has by no means needed for villains, and The Girl in Me exposes a veritable rogues’ gallery: Her father, James (aka “Jamie”), was allegedly “abusive” towards her mom and “reckless, chilly, and imply” along with her. Spears’ mom printed her personal memoir at her “expense,” she writes, proper after the household had ambushed her with the conservatorship. (“The timing was un-fucking-believable.”) There’s Justin Timberlake, who Spears believes used her for “ammunition” to advertise his debut solo album, Justified, and there’s additionally Federline, who thought he may change into a rapper after marrying her—“Bless his coronary heart”—after which painted her as “utterly uncontrolled” throughout their custody battle.
In Spears’ eyes, nevertheless, none of her family members have wronged her fairly like the entire strangers who disparaged her on nationwide tv, titillating their viewers with the sordid, embarrassing particulars of her life underneath the guise of “journalism.” (Did the general public actually need Diane Sawyer to ask a crying, 21-year-old Spears over and over what she should have accomplished to supposedly break Justin Timberlake’s coronary heart?) Along with Sawyer, Spears calls out Ryan Seacrest, who pressed Spears about her mothering throughout an interview that was “purported to be” about her new album, Blackout, and Sarah Silverman—who sauntered onto the VMA’s stage the place she’d simply carried out to name her kids “lovely errors.” … And people are simply those Spears bothers to say.
As Spears shortly realized, the general public discourse can typically perform fairly equally to an abusive mum or dad—setting not possible expectations and denigrating a younger celeb’s each transfer whereas dangling the tender, heat glow of approval inches out of attain. In her case, the media acted as an enforcer, flogging her within the public sq. to remind younger girls and ladies what would possibly occur in the event that they change into too promiscuous, too outspoken, too inarticulate, too actual, too fats, too free. Spears made clear early on that she by no means requested to be a task mannequin for younger ladies, however even when she had, anybody who’s grown up with a uterus is aware of that no actual, residing human being may ever stay as much as the duty.
Maybe that’s why Spears begins her guide from the higher branches of her household tree, describing her household’s darkish, tragic historical past. A New York journal article beforehand outlined a lot of what Spears describes: Her paternal grandfather, June, was allegedly abusive and had two of his wives dedicated to psychological hospitals in opposition to their will. A kind of wives killed herself beside her toddler son’s grave. Spears writes that her maternal grandmother, Lilian “Lily” Portell met her grandfather throughout World Warfare II and moved to New Orleans from London, the place she’d grown up, anticipating the identical metropolitan existence. As a substitute, she “missed London till the day she died” as a result of her husband frightened that if he let her go dwelling, she would possibly by no means come again.
These sordid, sorrowful anecdotes stand behind Spears to contextualize the generational facet of her wrestle: She’s removed from the primary girl in her household to seek out herself boxed in by expectations, trapped by insecure males with the assistance of a authorized system that may nonetheless, to at the present time, name a lady incompetent whereas she sells out area excursions and hand her destiny over to her alcoholic father.
In her guide, Spears makes clear that she at all times knew higher than anybody how ridiculous the conservatorship was. She’s additionally lengthy understood the media’s hypocrisy relating to her story.
“Kevin was leaving me alone with two infants when he needed to go smoke pot and document a rap track, ‘Popozão,’ slang for massive ass in Portuguese,” she writes. “Then he took them away from me, and he had Particulars journal calling him Dad of the Yr… When Justin cheated on me after which acted horny, it was seen as cute. However once I wore a glittery bodysuit, I had Diane Sawyer making me cry on nationwide tv, MTV making me hearken to folks criticizing my costumes, and a governor’s spouse saying she needed to shoot me.”
All through the guide, Spears grapples with the stress between the function the business demanded she play—the “good lady” in a brief skirt, the “endlessly virgin,” the pure Madonna—and the three-dimensional particular person she turned as she grew older. Lingering within the background are a bevy of former employees who additionally appear to have betrayed her; the safety guards Federline had employed off of her allegedly barred her from seeing him to repair their relationship, and she or he alleges that her lawyer was the one who’d instructed her to file for divorce to avoid wasting herself the embarrassment of Federline inevitably submitting.
“What I didn’t perceive was that Kevin would then insist I pay for his authorized payments,” she writes. “And since legally, I had set the divorce in movement, I might be held accountable within the press for having damaged up my younger household.”
Similar to at all times, Spears saved going and going and going after the divorce, however that second, like many others, additional shattered her belief. When she and Federline first met, Spears recollects within the guide, he’d held her in a pool for hours, holding her regular in his arms in a manner nobody had earlier than. In the course of the divorce, he turned only one extra one that couldn’t be trusted.
Spears’ tightrope lastly snapped within the late 2000s, when a tabloid circus sprang as much as cowl her each wrestle and stumble as a younger mom. In 2007, Spears misplaced custody of her sons—“as a result of,” as Perez Hilton heckled back then, “she’s a fuck-up that may’t obey the legislation.”
Then got here the conservatorship, throughout which era Spears alleges that her household involuntarily hospitalized her a number of instances. She recollects her household taking holidays on the seaside home she’d purchased them in Destin, Florida, whereas she was trapped working and residing on a gentle eating regimen of canned greens and rooster for 2 years. When she first noticed her household following her 2019 hospitalization, she remembers everybody performing like nothing had occurred.
“If you happen to’re asking why I went together with it, there’s one superb purpose,” Spears writes. “I did it for my youngsters. As a result of I performed by the principles, I used to be reunited with my boys.”
Los Angeles Superior Court docket Decide Brenda Penny launched Spears from her conservatorship in November of 2021. Since then, the singer has labored to reclaim her narrative—however as soon as once more, she’s discovered that that’s simpler mentioned than accomplished. Despite all of the “we should do higher” rhetoric that sprang out of the #BritneyMovement, tabloids have continued to scrutinize her each transfer whereas an more and more loud nook of the general public begins to ask if she actually deserves her freedom. Kathy Griffin joked throughout a current episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! that “generally, an individual may be too free. … I like you gays, I like you #FreeBritney folks, however you didn’t have a plan!”
In her guide, Spears airs out her frustration along with her little sister, Jamie Lynn Spears—who capitalized on the conservatorship discourse by publishing her personal tell-all, Things I Should Have Said, final 12 months—spilling “salacious” household tales earlier than Spears may get an actual phrase in. (Jamie Lynn’s guide launch week turned out disastrous, as sellers started slashing costs lower than every week after it had hit cabinets.) Earlier than The Girl in Me was obtainable for buy, just a few information retailers secured leaked worldwide copies from Mexico and commenced publishing the clickiest parts.
Predictable because the leak would possibly’ve been, it additionally illustrates the issue that retains ensnaring Spears: Her story has change into so useful that nobody needs to let her inform it herself. Higher to interrogate her on nationwide tv, or make a documentary, or chop her narrative up and promote it in items, freed from any context she would possibly’ve hoped to imbue. Spears writes that as a younger lady, she cherished performing as a result of it gave her a way of management she couldn’t discover anyplace else in her life; now, her fame leaves little room for dignity and none for privateness. (Simply ask the “followers” who known as the cops on her this January after she deleted her Instagram.)
Final week, Spears addressed this dilemma in an announcement posted to Instagram. “I don’t just like the headlines I’m studying,” she wrote. “… that’s precisely why I give up the enterprise 4 years in the past … I’ve moved on and it’s a good looking clear slate from right here !!!” She added that writing the guide had given her closure and that she hadn’t written it to “harp on previous experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and foolish !!!”
Narrative publicity remedy may also help complicated trauma survivors make sense of their experiences whereas additionally gaining some much-needed distance, and in writing her guide, it appears Spears has healed some wounds she’d now like to go away prior to now. However it would take time to see how a lot Spears’s voice—the story she’s really making an attempt to inform—can minimize by the noise.
The Girl in Me has loads to say about misogyny and energy and exploitation. However extra importantly, it’s a few girl who has endured numerous traumas and betrayals however continues to be someway, miraculously, right here to inform us about it. Not a woman, Spears is undeniably a lady—and despite all her human messiness and flaws, her memoir proves that she’s nonetheless one hell of a task mannequin.