After performing at MTV’s Video Music Awards in 2000, an 18-year-old Britney Spears sat down in front of a monitor while strangers in Times Square gave their opinions on her performance — many thought her outfits were “too sexy” and she was corrupting America’s youth.
Spears was confused. She was a teenage girl from the South. She signed her name with a heart. She liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat her like she was dangerous?
At the same time, Spears was noticing more and more older men in her audiences, “leering at me like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy”. She notes in her memoir that “no one seemed to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid.”
This realisation, which arrives 60 pages into The Woman in Me, feels like a turning point. The moment when the scales fall away, consciousness comes crashing in, and the God-fearing Louisiana girl who had trussed herself up in tiny dresses and high heels to sing for powerful men in record companies begins to see the world — and particularly the entertainment industry — as the manipulative, exploitative beast it really is.
What begins as a seemingly simple, straightforward recounting of Spears’s child stardom, alongside Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling and her future boyfriend Justin Timberlake on Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club — albeit a child stardom set against domestic chaos, divorce and paternal alcohol abuse — hardens into a polemic of “blind rage”.
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Rage at the music industry that constructed an image of eternal virginity (when “I’d been having sex since I was 14”) while simultaneously hypersexualising a teenage star. Rage at a public who refused to allow her to grow up: “When did I promise to stay 17?” Rage at a media who obsessed over her body (“I’d smiled politely while TV hosts leered at my breasts”) and her relationships. “I didn’t owe the media details of my breakup [with Timberlake]. I shouldn’t have been forced to speak on national TV, forced to cry in front of this stranger [Diane Sawyer], a woman who was going after me with harsh question after harsh question.”
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And, most sharply of all, rage at her family, who stripped her of all agency for 13 years while still profiting from her to the tune of millions. “I became a robot,” she writes. “I became more of an entity than a person.”
Spears’s account of her public head shaving in February 2007, in front of a phalanx of ever-present paparazzi, is the apotheosis of this many-sided rage. Her two sons, then aged 17 months and 5 months old, had been taken from her in a custody dispute with her husband, Kevin Federline, and she was, she writes, “out of my mind with grief”. “Shaving my head was my way of saying to the world, F*** you. You want me to be pretty for you? F*** you. You want me to be good for you? F*** you. You want me to be your dream girl? F*** you.”
A year later Spears’s father, Jamie, managed to get a judge to impose a conservatorship over his daughter, taking ownership of her “person” and her “estate”, and announcing, as she chillingly recounts: “I’m Britney Spears now.” She was not allowed to drink alcohol, or remove her own IUD. Parental controls were put on her iPhone. Potential dates were subjected to background checks and blood tests and forced to sign NDAs. She was put on a strict diet and exercise regime; for a two-year period she was allowed to eat little other than chicken and canned vegetables. “My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage,” Spears writes. “And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body.”
After forcing her on relentless tours, her father also signed her up to a repetitive, soul-crushing Las Vegas residency. Spears was given a weekly allowance of $2,000, while her father became a multimillionaire on the profits of her performances. It is not a little ironic that, she writes, she also “made one good song” during this period: Work Bitch.
“The music industry — really the whole world — is set up more for men,” she writes. And while not an overtly feminist manifesto, men do not come out of this story well. Spears notes early on the double standard in the media’s treatment of her and of Timberlake when he was her boyfriend — “I couldn’t help but notice that the questions he got asked by talk show hosts were different from the ones they asked me” — a double standard that only worsened after their breakup. “You did something that caused him so much pain. So much suffering,” Sawyer berates her, on air. “What did you do?”
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“I was described as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy.” In Spears’s telling, nothing could be less accurate; not only did Timberlake habitually cheat on her, she claims, but he also persuaded her to have an abortion, “something I never could have imagined for myself”. It was, she writes, important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, “which meant doing everything at home”. In a scene almost comedic in its grim awfulness, Spears lay on the bathroom floor in agony, and Timberlake joined her. “He thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it.”
And yet, given all that she has been subjected to, Spears’s prose contains more compassion and perspective than bitterness or self-pity. “Tragedy runs in my family,” she writes. When describing how she was forcibly confined to a mental institution for months and put on lithium, she notes that her paternal grandmother, Jean, was put on the same drug when she was sent to an asylum. Her grandfather’s second wife was sent to the same asylum. Her father was 13 when Jean took her own life aged 31, shooting herself at the grave of her baby son who had died at three days old.
There are moments of levity, poking fun at herself, pregnant and in the midst of home renovations — “a very demanding grown woman yelling about white marble” — and at others, writing wryly of Federline’s ambitions: “He really thought he was a rapper now. Bless his heart …” Her succinct description of a brief fling with Colin Farrell as a “two-week brawl … grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight” does not even feel like salacious tittletattle, but a joyful and much-needed sliver of sexual freedom.
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Spears’s story is a cautionary tale about fame, and particularly young, female fame. While she was breaking records still in her teens, heralded as the Princess of Pop, “I can see now that you have to be smart enough, vicious enough, deliberate enough to play the game, and I did not know the game.”
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Spears is now 41, and appears to finally understand the game. But anyone expecting her memoir to be the first step in a musical comeback may be disappointed. “I’m free now,” she writes. “I’m just being myself and trying to heal. I finally get to do what I want, when I want. And I don’t take a minute of it for granted.”
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears (Gallery, 288pp; £25). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
