The public perception has long been that outlandish drug use or a terrible mental-health crisis must have justified her captivity. But the underlying mysteries of her long legal saga remain vexing, both to the reader and to Spears herself. An umbrella.”) She revisits the circumstances that led to the conservatorship, including the famous incident when she, in the midst of a custody dispute, locked herself with her younger son in a bathroom. “I knew the truth of our relationship was nothing like how it was being portrayed, but I still imagined that if I was suffering, I must have deserved it.”Īs Spears matured, a cycle of scrutiny and rebellion accelerated, though the rebellions-such as Spears having kids with a “bad boy,” the backup dancer Kevin Federline, and attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella-come off as tame in the book’s telling. “As a child, I’d always had a guilty conscience, a lot of shame, a sense that my family thought I was just plain bad,” she writes in a section about being vilified after her breakup with Timberlake. Her most intimate experiences were never her own she mattered too much, to too many people. The book’s description of him pressuring her into a secret abortion at home suggests that the affable, gentlemanly reputation he’s long enjoyed was hollow.īut looking back, Spears almost appears less bothered by Timberlake’s treatment of her than by the media’s obsession with their romance. His public expressions of lust were cheered while hers were condemned. In the book and in media coverage of late, Timberlake has been cast, almost too neatly, as an example of the gendered double standards of early-2000s pop culture. In early adolescence she was cast on The Mickey Mouse Club another Mouseketeer, Justin Timberlake, would become both her peer in teen stardom and her serious boyfriend from 1999 to 2002. Singing beckoned as an escape from her tense home life, but the stage provided no refuge from others’ judgment and control. June’s harshness, Spears feels, made her own father, Jamie, a cruel and demanding alcoholic. One of those wives killed herself on the grave of her infant child. “Tragedy runs in my family,” Spears writes, before describing her paternal grandfather, June, as an abusive man who committed two of his wives to mental hospitals. Describing her childhood in rural Louisiana, Spears’s declarative sentences have the ominousness of the Old Testament, and her themes are Southern Gothic. Readers expecting a breezy celebrity memoir will be shocked by the grim opening pages. People seem to want her to be a scapegoat for all manner of human failings, and, in fact, they seem to want to punish her. A reader may come away feeling that her struggle is older, more primal, than our cultural era. But she also writes with mystification about the scale of her story, the extraordinary drama and unfairness of it. She portrays herself-including with the title The Woman in Me-as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney-allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner-was a mistake. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her.
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