Spears’s The Woman in Me, a ground breaking book illuminating the enduring power of music and lvoe and the importance of a women telling her own story, on her own terms at last, a brave moving story about freedom, hope, fame, motherhood, faith, and survival – and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. 

Britney Spears’s story is a constraining tale about young female fame, while she was breaking records still in her teens, heralded as the Princes 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 then”. Britney now 41, appears to finally understand the game. “ I’m 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”.

As Britney, lay on the bathroom floor in agony, because of a home abortion, Timberlake strummed his guitar.

An 18-year-old Britney Spear’s after performing at MTV’s Video Music Awards in 2000, sat down in front of a monitor while strangers in Times Square gave their opinion on her performance – many thought her outfits were “too sexy” and she was corrupting America’s youth. Spears,  a teenager from south was confused and signed her name with a heart, and liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat her like she was dangerous. She noticed 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 realization is the moment in The Women in Me feels like a turning point  when the scales fall away, consciousness come 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, the entertaining industry in the manipulative, exploitive beast it really is. It began as a straight forward recounting of Spears’s child stardom, alongside Ryan Gosling, Christina Aguilera, and her future boyfriend Justin Timberlake on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club – a child stardom set against domestic chaos, divorce and paternal alcohol abuse hardens into “blind rage”.

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 also at the public who refused to allow her to grow up. “When did I promise to stay 17?” she asks, 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 break-up with Timberlake. I should not have been forced to speak on national TV, forced to cry in front of the stranger ( Diane  Sawyer), a woman who was going after me with harsh questions after harsh questions.” And rage also at her family, who stripper 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 paparazzi, is the core supposition of multi-dimensional 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 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 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 to go 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 performance.  It is ironic she 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 of media’s treatment of her and of Timberlake when he as 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 break-up.  “ You did something that caused him so much pain. So much suffering” Swayer asks her on air “What did you do?”

“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 important that no one found out about the pregnancy or the abortion, “which meant doing everything at home”. 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”.

She write “ Tragedy runs in my family”, describing her forcibly confined to a mental institution for months and put on lithium, she notes that her parental 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.

She was poling fun at herself, pregnant and in the midst of home renovations – “ a very demanding grown woman yelling about white marble  and others  writing wryly of Federline’s ambitions, he really thought he was a rapper now. Bless his heart”.

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears, Gallery, £25, 288 pages.