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Britney Spears suffered so many forms of injustice when she was under legal conservatorship. She had to tour even when she didn’t want to. She had to perform nightly in Vegas and wasn’t allowed to change any of the choreography. She couldn’t drive a car, her first dates had to submit to blood tests and background checks, and she didn’t have control of her own money. (Once, she tried to pay for dinner for her backup dancers and she didn’t have enough in her allowance account to cover the check — mortifying.) After more than a decade of this, she was institutionalized against her will. That last one was a living nightmare, but it was the little stuff that, as she writes in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, “put my fire out.” The thing that really bothered her was when her family would drink in front of her, while she “wasn’t even allowed a sip of Jack and Coke.”
This exclusion was especially galling given the history. The Spears family were drinkers. Britney’s father, Jamie, was an alcoholic. Her mother, Lynne, started giving Britney cocktails when she was in the eighth grade. But, Britney explains, how mother and daughter drank didn’t have anything to do with how Jamie drank: “When he drank, he grew more depressed and shut down. We became happier, more alive and adventurous.” Some of Britney’s “best times” growing up were when she was sipping on “a little bitty White Russian” in the car while her mother drove her and her toddler sister, Jamie Lynn, to the beach. When the drink “had the perfect amount of shaved ice and cream and sugar and not too much alcohol, that was my piece of heaven.”
One is tempted to read the conservatorship and its deprivations as a way for Britney’s parents to, yes, convert her into capital that they could exploit but also to relive her adolescence, ruling over her with the authority they failed to exert the first time around. The 13 years of the conservatorship lasted almost as long as Britney’s actual childhood, which ended when she, a legal minor living with a guardian in New York because her mother was down in Louisiana raising her sister, wore a schoolgirl uniform for the “… Baby One More Time” video. Of course, another way of looking at Britney (there are so many more than 13!) is that her childhood couldn’t be repeated because it had never ended in the first place. Did Britney grow up too fast, or was she never allowed to grow up at all? As Keats taught us about negative capability, as Kierkegaard taught us about paradox, so Britney has been saying, for literally decades, that she dwells in doubt, being neither one thing nor the other — not a girl, not yet a woman; never a woman; perhaps only a vessel, a potentiality — for the woman inside her (The Woman in Me!) struggles to be born, is always being born, was always already being born. All of this is a long way of saying that Britney was a child who was denied childhood and whose parents sought, in the conservatorship, to reduce her to adolescence and control her, just as her managers, producers, and the media had controlled her actual adolescence.
As the facts of the conservatorship became widely known, Britney’s symbolic meaning in the culture changed. No longer was she a bad mom or a hot mess; she was a symptom, a symbol, and a scapegoat, the product and victim of a misogynist and exploitative millennial media machine. The Britney feeding frenzy was the last gasp of those tabloid and music-industry forces, the last celebrity sacrifice before the triumph of reality everything and the implosion of the major record labels. But the Britney in The Woman in Me does not write about herself in these terms. Analyzing the cultural meaning of her life is the job of documentarians, journalists, and posters; she doesn’t tell us what her life means or why it took the shape it did, only how it felt to live it. She is especially attuned to humiliations, which feel fresh and raw. Once, during the year she was recording her debut album, she attended a barbecue, where she ran into a screen door and fell down: “Everyone looked up and saw me on the floor, holding my nose. When I tell you I was embarrassed, I swear to God …”
There’s no way to read The Woman in Me and not see that Britney was coerced at every stage. She was a little girl who competed and auditioned when she was too young to understand the implications of that choice. A teenager dueling with a hostile press. (As bad as the tabloids were, the mainstream media — Matt Lauer, Diane Sawyer — treated her no better.) A lovesick 20-something dragged and shamed by a world-historically shitty ex-boyfriend. A mother deprived of her children, in a state of mind best captured by a Greek tragedian. But — another paradox — to characterize Britney in these terms is only to deny her more of the agency that she’s already been denied. The Britney of The Woman in Me knows she was used, but she refuses to be a victim. Yes, the paparazzi targeted her, but she was, after all, having a hard time. (She doesn’t blame the paparazzi for creating the hard time, only for documenting and exacerbating it.) No, she couldn’t cut her tour short when she was depressed and exhausted, but she did put her foot down over particularly dumb concepts for music videos. If she is a lamb, she walks to the slaughter with her eyes wide open. More than anything, she insists on her willingness to be sold: “If anyone was able to put something together for me that presented me in a format people could relate to, I was ready.”
Britney recorded her self-titled debut album when she was 15 years old. The first booth she sang in, she writes in The Woman in Me, was underground: “When you’re inside it, you just hear yourself sing, nothing else.” Singing by herself was all that she had ever wanted to do. Back in Kentwood, Louisiana, she had “walked for hours in the silent woods outside my house, singing songs.” It was how she avoided going home, where her mother was always yelling at her father. Singing was “magic.” It allowed her to “communicate purely.” It also did the opposite of communication, taking her “to a mystical place where language doesn’t matter anymore, where anything is possible.” Not that escape was exactly what Britney was after. She didn’t want to be someone else. She wanted to be herself, but to do that, she first had to lose herself in fantasy: “All I wanted was to be taken out of the everyday world and into that realm where I could express myself without thinking.”
The Woman in Me is many things — circular, repetitive, at times remarkably vivid, at other times maddeningly vague. But it is not inconsistent or incoherent. Britney’s central ambition remains constant: to express herself without thinking. Britney wants to move her body. She wants to “feel sexy” and likes “looking cute.” She doesn’t have an idea about the world that she’s trying to get across. Her drive for self-expression is wrapped up in a need to assert the fact of her existence. That’s why she turned to social media. “At a certain point, I’d rather be ‘crazy’ and able to make what I want than ‘a good sport’ and doing what everyone tells me to do without being able to actually express myself,” she writes. “And on Instagram, I wanted to show that I existed.”
It shouldn’t be hard to prove that you’re a person — but Britney has been so often ignored and misunderstood, used up and thrown away. Once, in the 2000s, after Justin Timberlake dumped her and demonized her in the “Cry Me a River” video, Britney finished her Dream Within a Dream world tour and went home to Kentwood to collapse. Her mother was coping with the recent divorce from her dad; her little sister was drinking chocolate milkshakes in front of the TV and being “a total bitch.” There Britney was, in the nice house that she had bought for them, emptying her purse in front of a photographer to prove no drugs were in it, desperately heartbroken, world famous, and her mother and sister barely noticed: “I can remember walking into the room and feeling like no one even saw me.” She felt like “a ghost child.”
Several villains emerge in The Woman in Me — Jamie and Kevin Federline, of course, but also Timberlake, who does not look good. In one startlingly vivid passage, Britney reveals that she got pregnant while they were dating. She wanted to keep the baby, but Timberlake “said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were too young.” Britney didn’t want to “push him into something he didn’t want. Our relationship was too important to me.” So she agreed to have an abortion and to do it at their home in Orlando to avoid publicity.
On the appointed day, with only Felicia [her minder and guardian] and Justin there, I took the little pills. Soon I started having excruciating cramps. I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming. They should’ve numbed me with something, I thought. I wanted some kind of anesthesia. I wanted to go to the doctor. I was so scared. I lay there wondering if I was going to die.
The pain, Britney writes, was “unbelievable.” She was on her knees, holding the toilet. Timberlake came in to be with her: “At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it.”
The other most memorable passages in the book have to do with motherhood. Britney had Sean Preston and Jayden James a year apart. As a young mother, she suffered postpartum depression and anxiety but was also deeply bonded to her sons. She writes in almost Winnicottian terms about the confusion of early motherhood, describing herself as aging “backward” with her children, “as if some part of me became the baby.” All she wanted in life was to hold them: “My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children. That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God.” Federline waged a vicious custody battle. Once, when she fled to the bathroom holding Jayden because she didn’t want a visit to end, a SWAT team showed up. For “weeks and weeks,” Federline refused to let her see her children, who were 17 months and 5 months old. “I was simply out of my mind with grief,” she writes. Shaving her head was an act of desperation, a “fuck you” to the world that was so unkind and against her.
I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it.
As disturbing as the wrong done to her is, her tendency in The Woman in Me is to go beyond claiming agency and actually apologize or take responsibility for those wrongs. Of the conservatorship: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begun to think in some ways like a child.” She knows that the audience likes to see her long hair move onstage — for her to “thrash it. If your hair’s moving, they can believe you’re having a good time.” But when she was depressed and performing in Vegas, she sometimes wore tight wigs and danced so that “not one hair” moved: “When I look back, I realize how much of myself I withheld onstage, how much by trying to punish the people who held me captive I punished everyone else, too — including my loyal fans, including myself.” The worst is when she apologizes and calls herself “controlling” for not wanting her mother to hold Jayden for his first two months. That’s when I wanted to scream at her. Britney! That woman is toxic! Trust yourself and your beautiful maternal instincts!
“There’s been a lot of speculation about how I’m doing,” Britney writes in the final pages of the book. (There always has been, but she’s referring here to the past two years.) “I know my fans care. I am free now. 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.”
What is freedom to a woman who has been in captivity all her life? Britney has some ideas.
Freedom means being goofy, silly, and having fun on social media. Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911. Freedom means being able to make mistakes, and learning from them. Freedom means I don’t have to perform for anyone — onstage or offstage. Freedom means I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else. And freedom means the ability, and the right, to search for joy, in my own way, on my own terms.
Or, as Sartre wrote, “We want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance.”
I keep saying Britney and she, though, of course, The Woman in Me was reportedly written with a ghostwriter — Sam Lansky, a music journalist and author of a memoir and novel. The voice of Memoir Britney that they crafted together is naïve and chatty and more polished than the manic Britney we know from Instagram. Here, for comparison’s sake, is a recent comment, posted after she and Sam Asghari divorced:
I’ve been playing it strong for way too long and my Instagram may seem perfect but it’s far from reality and I think we all know that !!! I would love to show my emotions and tears on how I really feel but [for] some reason I’ve always had to hide my weaknesses !!! If I wasn’t my dad’s strong soldier, I would be sent away to places to get fixed by doctors !!! But that’s when I needed family the most !!! You’re supposed to be loved unconditionally … not under conditions !!!! So I will be as strong as I can and do my best !!! And I’m actually doing pretty damn good !!!
A book written entirely in the voice of that caption would be a triumph of experimental style, but it would make for difficult reading. No one will have a hard time finishing The Woman in Me. Still, one misses Instagram Britney. Memoir Britney is less chaotic but blander — she’s confiding and sympathetic, but there’s something off. When Memoir Britney writes that “listening to music on my phone helps me cope with the anger and sadness I face as an adult,” a reader may suspect that she has been replaced with a chatbot dispensing wellness advice. That same reader may also, rudely, reflect that typically musicians are more specific about what kind of music they like listening to. (On the other hand, when Britney writes that her favorite style of dancing is “prissy, girly follies, Pussycat Doll-like, serve-off-your-corset moves,” the wish is for her to be less specific.)
Britney knows that she has been exploited — actually, as she puts it, “I felt like I had been exploited,” which lacks some of the critical force one might hope for. Fame isn’t the problem in her telling; it’s that she wasn’t good at being famous: “I never knew how to play the game. I was truly innocent — just clueless … I was a newly single mom of two little boys — I didn’t have the time to fix my hair before I went out into a sea of photographers.” Those who took or take pleasure in watching Britney spiral are excited, I think, by the spectacle not just of one individual’s suffering but by the breakdown of the well-functioning celebrity machine, the boring carousel of press junkets and publicity pap. Britney was so fake and yet so real, so empty and yet so expressive of feeling. She was at once the machine’s purest expression and a disturbance in the machine’s normal functioning. “I didn’t know how to present myself on any level,” she writes. “I was a bad dresser.”
If only she had taken her meeting with Mariah Carey more to heart! Britney knocked on her dressing-room door once, backstage at an awards show. When Carey opened the door, “out poured the most otherworldly light.” Sweet young Britney tried to take her photo with Carey in the dim hallway, but Carey ushered her in, closer to the “otherworldly light,” and put her “good side” toward the camera. “You know how we all have ring lights now? Well, more than 20 years ago, only Mariah Carey knew about ring lights.” Britney won an award that night but doesn’t remember what it was: “The perfect photo with Mariah Carey — that was the real prize.”
“I wasn’t manipulative,” Britney writes in The Woman in Me. “I was just stupid.” I wouldn’t dream of invalidating Britney’s experience by arguing otherwise. But to imagine that you are stupid is to imagine that someone, somewhere is smart. It’s a reassuring thought, the kind of thought a little girl would have, or a woman in a state of profound arrested development; it’s the thought of someone who still hopes to be smart, who can’t bring themselves to believe in the utter waste and futility of the game itself. It turns out that Britney’s search for joy, her expression of freedom, is nothing other than the desperate attempt to come back and win the same game she lost for so long. One wishes that Britney would save herself, turn off the ring lights and leave the whole miserable setup behind — but where on earth is she free to go?
