Overview of Britney Spears’s memoir, ‘The Girl in Me’

Taylor Swift as soon as famous in her 2020 documentary “Miss Americana”: “There’s this factor folks say about celebrities, that they’re frozen on the age they bought well-known.” Spears’s new memoir, “The Girl in Me,” chronicles the star’s formative years and provides her first full account of the 13 years she spent below the conservatorship of her father, Jamie, earlier than it was terminated in November 2021. It’s laborious to learn any one in every of its 275 pages with out considering that Swift’s people knowledge have to be rooted in some fact. As Spears appears to be like again at her life, first with wistfulness after which with rage, it’s clear she feels that, though her earliest years have been spent being hurried into maturity, she has spent that maturity feeling like a baby in a world of corrupt grown-ups.

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Spears’s story begins, famously by now, in Kentwood, La., and she or he focuses equally on the idylls of Louisiana life and the tribulations of her father’s alcoholism and her dad and mom’ stormy marriage earlier than shifting her gaze to the exhilarating early years of her music profession. She cherished the newfound feeling of management over her life, she writes — however the finish of her much-publicized relationship with Justin Timberlake, which resulted in 2002, when Spears was 19, marks the primary of a number of instances she describes turning into childlike throughout overwhelming instances.

Spears moved out of the house she shared with Timberlake and went dwelling to Louisiana, however “life in Louisiana had handed me by. I felt like I had nobody to speak to,” she writes. “Going by that breakup, going dwelling and seeing how a lot I didn’t slot in wherever anymore, I spotted that I used to be technically rising up, turning into a girl. And but, truthfully, it was nearly like I went backward on the similar time and have become youthful in my thoughts.”

The months after the births of her two sons, in 2005 and 2006 — which Spears now says have been characterised by “nearly each symptom” of perinatal despair — additionally resulted in what she describes as a Benjamin Button impact. “I aged backward. Actually, as a brand new mom, it was as if some a part of me grew to become the child. One a part of me was a really demanding grown girl … whereas one other a part of me was instantly very childlike.”

To learn the remainder of “The Girl in Me” is to be saddened time and time once more by the methods Spears has felt damage, blindsided even, by the opportunism of others. She writes that she knew Timberlake slept with different ladies throughout their relationship however turned a blind eye — and even had an abortion she didn’t need — to maintain him round. After Timberlake then dumped her by way of textual content message, Spears writes, he went on to write down “Cry Me a River” about having been cheated on. “Everybody felt very sorry for him. And it shamed me,” she writes. “Wherever I went, I might get booed. I might go to golf equipment and I might hear boos.”

Just a few years later, when her marriage to Kevin Federline was crumbling, a lawyer knowledgeable Spears that if she didn’t file for divorce, Federline would. “I used to be led to imagine that it will be higher if I did it first in order that I wasn’t humiliated,” Spears writes. “What I didn’t perceive was that Kevin would then insist I pay for his authorized payments. 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.”

Put up-divorce, Spears writes, she even wound up inadvertently taking part in an extramarital affair with a photographer she dated. “I didn’t know then that the photographer was married,” she writes. “I solely discovered that out after we’d damaged up.”

As Spears’s timeline rolls into the years she was below her father’s guardianship, her tone adjustments from reflective to insistent. The profanity kicks up many notches, and several other passages of the final half of the e-book, when her ire turns towards her household, appear to share the identical breathless, distraught tone as her assertion to the Los Angeles Superior Courtroom in 2021.

The harrowing particulars of Spears’s conservatorship — her father’s near-total management of her funds and day by day life, the ever-present surveillance to which Spears was subjected — are well-known by now. However the particulars revealed in “The Girl in Me” disturb much more deeply as Spears illustrates the adolescent-surrounded-by-sinister-adults dynamic. Spears stays adamant that she was taken in to the psychiatric analysis that led to her conservatorship below false pretenses: She alleges that she went to a seashore home upon her mom’s invitation to speak however was greeted by a SWAT group. She alleges that her father despatched her to rehab although she’d solely been taking over-the-counter power dietary supplements, and that her father managed a lot of her life — together with her work schedule and weight-reduction plan — that he taunted her by saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”

“I grew to become a robotic. However not only a robotic — a kind of child-robot,” she writes.

Britney Spears and the trauma of being younger, feminine and well-known within the ’90s

Tellingly, although, even the post-conservatorship denouement of “The Girl in Me” finds Spears having fun with her newfound freedom by relinquishing management. On a 2022 trip to Cancún, she went jet-skiing for the primary time in years. Remembering how unpredictable and bumpy the waves may very well be, Spears writes, she requested her assistant to take the handlebars — and, identical to a baby may, fortunately assumed the again seat.