Britney Spears’ ‘The Woman in Me’: 8 takeaways from a book full of fury
The singer’s new memoir goes on sale this week.
Britney Spears is furious. I was furious.
Of course, “The Woman in Me,” the singer’s new memoir, is about more than just venting. She provides detailed, cogent accounts of humiliations that would make anyone furious. But Spears has clearly accumulated a lot of resentment over the course of her 41 years, particularly toward those who enabled her conservatorship, including much of her family, and toward the hordes of paparazzi who followed her around at all times.
Let’s not even get started on Justin Timberlake. No, not right now. But not for long.
The book follows Spears’ life from childhood to the not-quite-present — it ends before her brief marriage to Sam Asghari — and begins with a list of relatives who suffered from mental illness or alcoholism. Spears’ family history is littered with abusers and abusees, including her grandmother Jean, who fatally shot herself with a shotgun on the grave of her son three days after he was born in 1966. Jean was only 31 years old.
In short, Spears didn’t have a plan for a normal life, and a normal life is far from what she’s led since becoming a pop sensation.
It’s a lot for anyone to handle — or absorb. Here are eight key takeaways from “The Woman in Me,” which will be released on Tuesday.
She used to have the ability to burn.
Spears rose to fame at the age of 16 with the release of “… Baby, One More Time.”
Four years later, she was performing at the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show, which she describes as “just one of the seemingly endless good things that are happening for me.”
“I landed the ‘most powerful woman’ spot on the Forbes list of most powerful celebrities — the following year I’d be number one overall,” she writes. She was getting offers for Pepsi commercials and the film “Crossroads,” though the latter turned her off acting because she didn’t like how she disappeared into her character.
“When I look back on that time, I realize I was truly living the dream, my dream.” “My tours took me all over the world,” she says, adding that she was having fun and “being 19” at the time. She declined a role in the film adaptation of “Chicago,” which she appears to regret. And she wishes she could have had even more fun.
“I had power back then; I wish I’d used it more thoughtfully,” she recollects, “been more rebellious.”
She claims she has never had an alcohol problem. However, Adderall…
“I liked to drink, but it was never out of control,” Spears writes, despite recalling drinking with her mother when she was 12 and later partying with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. “I was this little girl who had worked so much, and then all of a sudden the schedule was blank for a few days, and so: Hello, alcohol!” she says of a trip to Las Vegas with some tour friends in 2003. That’s when she apparently wasted 55 hours by marrying childhood friend Jason Alexander.
“Do you want to know what my favorite drug is?” Spears inquires. “Aside from drinking, the only thing I really did?” Adderall is an amphetamine that is prescribed to children for ADHD. Yes, Adderall got me high, but what I found far more appealing was that it made me feel less depressed for a few hours. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant, and I desperately needed one.”
Spears claims she began taking Prozac in 2000 and was given envelopes full of medication while under conservatorship, but she never says what she is or isn’t taking now.
But! She confesses to smoking Virginia Slims. Smokes, in the present tense. Don’t tell the children.
Justin Timberlake was an absolute jerk.
J.T., whom Spears met when they were both on “The Mickey Mouse Club” as children, was her first major love affair, with whom she later reconnected years later. While the two were living together, he also broke her heart severely. He cheated on her multiple times, she claims, and then he broke up with her via text message, went on an infamous PR tour bashing her, and wrote songs that portrayed her as the bad guy in their relationship.
Britney, too, cheated on Justin once. She kissed choreographer Wade Robson, but that was the end of it, she claims.
“[A]s much as Justin hurt me, there was a huge foundation of love, and when he left me I was devastated,” Spears writes. “When I say I was devastated, I mean I couldn’t speak for months.” Every time someone asked me about him, all I could do was cry. I’m not sure if I was clinically in shock, but it felt like it.”
There was also the fact that she had previously been pregnant with his child, which she had terminated after he insisted they were too young to have a child. “I was told, ‘It might hurt a little,'” she said of her medically assisted at-home miscarriage. Then she describes the cramping and agony she felt while lying on the bathroom floor as the medication took effect. She writes that Timberlake played guitar for her while she was in pain.
Timberlake has since apologized for his actions, though this was before the abortion story became public this week. But he cemented for Spears the notion that the world was run by and for men, while women were blamed for their mistakes.
Guys, she would have been fine on her own.
Then there was the conservatorship, which occurred following her messy divorce from Kevin Federline and the loss of custody of their children. “If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” she writes. “I felt like a shadow of myself for thirteen years.” “It makes me sick to think about my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for so long.”
She compares herself to male musicians who have struggled with substance abuse or who have lost all of their money without ever losing their freedom. “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me,” she says at the end.
Saying ‘no’ resulted in her being held against her will and drugged.
Spears discusses the months she spent in a “luxury” rehab facility in Beverly Hills, California, after her father informed her that over-the-counter “energy supplements” had been discovered in her purse. This occurred shortly after she refused to perform a dance move she deemed too dangerous for her second Las Vegas residency, which was ultimately canceled.
“My father told me that if I didn’t go, I’d have to go to court, which would be embarrassing.” ‘We will make you look like a f— idiot, and trust me, you will not win,’ he said. It’s better if I tell you to go than if a judge tells you.’
“I felt like it was a form of blackmail and I was being gaslit,” she said. “I honestly felt they were trying to kill me.”
In rehab, she was abruptly taken off Prozac and placed on lithium — a powerful medication that her grandmother Jean had been on — and forced to undergo extensive therapy. She spent two months alone, followed by one month in a building with other patients.
“Three months into my confinement, I started to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore.”
And then there is Dad
Spears appears to be over her family, particularly her father, Jamie. Mom Lynne, brother Bryan, and sister Jamie Lynn are mocked (with a few brief moments of admiration), but dear old dad receives nothing but rage.
She blames Jamie’s alcoholism for “making us so poor” during her childhood, painting a picture of a man who she claims regularly drank himself out of his mind. Jamie allegedly made millions off her while keeping her under his strict control for the 13 years of conservatorship. And she claims he berated her from her childhood to the end of her conservatorship.
“You are a disgrace,” her father told her after she lost custody of her children.
When he was appointed conservator for her, he allegedly told her, “I’m Britney Spears now.”
P.S. : Sam Asghari
Hasem, as Spears refers to her now-divorced husband, Sam Asghari, appears to be her touchstone in references woven throughout the nearly 300-page book.
“Now my husband, Hesam, tells me that it’s a whole thing for beautiful girls to shave their heads,” she writes after detailing the infamous head-shaving incident and her subsequent umbrella attack on a paparazzi’s car. “It’s a vibe,” he says, referring to his decision not to conform to conventional beauty standards. He tries to make me feel better about it because he knows how much it still bothers me.”
After five years of dating, the couple married in June 2022, about a half-year after she ended her conservatorship. However, after finishing the book in August, Asghari filed for divorce from Spears.
Finally…
“If you follow me on Instagram, you probably thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?” she says in the book’s acknowledgments. She concludes her comment with a string of single-rose emojis — and heartfelt gratitude to her “collaborators,” who appear to know who they are.
