“I’m not that innocent,” belts Britney Spears in her 2000 hit song "Oops! … I Did It Again." That certainly sounds like it was true as you read the first part of Spears’s hit new memoir, The Woman in Me. She writes of growing up too fast in the tiny town of Kentwood, Louisiana, witnessing her father’s alcohol-induced mood swings and dayslong absences from the family, waiting tables at the local seafood restaurant at age 9, drinking daiquiris with her mother at 13, and losing her virginity at 14. All the while, the soon-to-be star was flying back and forth to New York City for grueling theater performances and meetings with record execs.
“Even amid all the darkness, there was still a lot of joy in my childhood,” Spears writes. Indeed, her memoir teeters back and forth from the depths of despair to exhilaration. Reading it is a wild and gut-wrenching ride. By the time you get to Spears’s description of the emotional and physical agony she endured from having an abortion at 19, after she became pregnant with boyfriend Justin Timberlake’s baby, your heart will ache.
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Spears makes it very clear that throughout the course of her 41 years, she has only wanted to make others happy: “to please my parents, to please audiences, to please everyone.” Spears implies that being a people-pleaser for so long was a precursor to losing her self-determination and, eventually, her basic legal rights.
Spears’s relationship with Timberlake and its much-publicized end left an early indelible scar on Spears. “It was insane how much I loved him,” she writes. And although Timberlake ultimately broke up with her over text message while she was on the set of a music video, he later flew out to visit her in Louisiana for a final, in-person goodbye. “He brought me a long letter he’d written and framed,” she writes. “I still have it under my bed. And at the end it said … ‘I can’t breathe without you.’” Spears continues, “That was exactly how I felt. It almost felt like I was suffocating, like I couldn’t breathe, after all that had happened.”
So much drama, and this is only page 80.
Spears is shamelessly honest, holding nothing back of what she was feeling. That time she sang and danced with a 7-foot python on her shoulders at the MTV Video Music Awards? “It was even more terrifying than it appeared. … In my head I was saying, Just perform, just use your legs and perform. But what nobody knows is that as I was singing, the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing at me. You didn’t see that shot on the TV, but in real life? I was thinking, Are you f***ing serious right now?”
That time she shaved off all her hair while the paparazzi were stalking her? “Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me.” As she explains, she was in the middle of a bitter custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline, former backup dancer and the father of their two infant sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James, whom he was withholding from her at the time.
Spears’s story is one of turbulent relationships with men who broke her trust and didn’t have her best interests at heart. But the man most guilty is her own father, Jamie Spears. How the princess of pop, one of the most powerful women in the world and biggest pop stars of a generation, had her legal rights stripped from her by her father through a conservatorship — usually reserved for people with no mental capacity or elderly people suffering from dementia — is the biggest tragedy in this tale.
While Spears admits to taking a lot of Adderall and being “hell on wheels” at this time, she claims she never had a drinking problem and never had any interest in hard drugs. “I felt I had more of a rage and grief problem than a substance abuse problem,” she explains.
It didn’t matter. In February 2008, the court placed her under a conservatorship with her father and an attorney as conservators. For 13 years, her father had full control over her personal life, finances, and healthcare. He confiscated her cellphone and controlled her diet (for two years, she ate almost nothing but chicken and canned vegetables). He sent her to rehab and to Alcoholics Anonymous for taking over-the-counter energy supplements and placed her in a mental health facility against her will, where she was forced to take lithium.
She was unable to seek her own legal representation and was instead at the will of court-appointed attorneys who couldn’t care less about her well-being. She even feared for her life. “After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. They could’ve tried to kill me, I thought. I started to wonder if they did want to kill me.” Any well-meaning acquaintances Spears made during her concert tours, even a friendly hairdresser, would disappear from her life. No one was allowed to get too close.
But her work schedule was the one area of her life where she couldn’t slow down. “I appeared on Good Morning America, did the Christmas-tree lighting in Los Angeles, shot a segment for Ellen, and toured through Europe and Australia,” Spears writes. “But again, the question was nagging at me — if I was so sick that I couldn’t make my own decisions, why did they think it was fine for me to be out there smiling and waving and singing and dancing in a million time zones a week? I’ll tell you one good reason. The Circus Tour [of 2009] grossed more than $130 million.” In other words, Spears, who was unable to manage any aspect of her life, worked harder than she ever had under the conservatorship. Her family and court-appointed lawyers rode the Britney gravy train.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.” Despite those dark periods, she fought silently to win back her freedom. And in November 2021, the nightmare ended when a judge ruled the conservatorship was no longer required.
Writing this memoir seems to have been a cathartic experience for Spears. She expresses her gratitude for her fans and all those who rallied in the #FreeBritney movement: “If you stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself: from the bottom of my heart, thank you.” Her book will only endear her more to her legions of fans while making anyone else who hasn’t been paying as much attention to her life and career feel astonished over what a grown woman had to endure under a demoralizing conservatorship — and seriously question our legal system.
“How do you cling to hope?” Spears asks. For Spears, her sons, now 18 and 17 years old, are a big source of hope and give her life meaning. They were the ones who came up with the name for her latest studio album: Glory. Here’s hoping Ms. Spears finds glory and, more importantly, peace and happiness once again.
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Erin Montgomery is a writer and nurse living in Florida.