CELEBRITY
Britney Spears Memoir ‘The Woman In Me’ Filled With Revelations About Her Life And Career
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Britney Spears’ hotly anticipated memoir The Woman In Me hit shelves on Tuesday, dedicated to her sons, and with an acknowledgement to fans, who helped her during the most troubled times of her 13-year conservatorship.
“I dont think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning,” she wrote in the 275-page memoir.
“I was not okay, not at all. And the fact that my friends and my fans sensed what was happening and did all that for me, thats a debt I can never repay. If you stood up for me when I couldnt stand up for myself: from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”
Spears, 41, writes about her road to pop stardom, her relationships, her public breakdown, and the legal conservatorship that put her father, Jamie Spears, in complete control of her career, finances, medical decisions and personal life until November 2021.
“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it, Spears wrote.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself, Spears wrote. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
In court testimony in 2021, Spears alleged conservatorship abuse, including being drugged against her will and forced to perform, enriching her father, his lawyers, and everyone around her, even though she couldn’t spend her own money as she chose.
Conservatorships are typically reserved for the elderly or severely disabled, who are unable to make their own financial, legal, or healthcare decisions.
It makes me feel sick,” Spears wrote. Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money, she wrote. I didnt deserve what my family did to me.
She also revealed details of her relationship with Justin Timberlake, including that he had cheated on her, and that she felt pressured to have an abortion when she became pregnant during their relationship, which ended in 2002.
Justin definitely wasnt happy about the pregnancy. He said we werent ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young, Spears wrote. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didnt want to be a father.”
Spears described an infamous interview with Diane Sawyer after their breakup as a breaking point for me internally.
Id often retreated to my apartment to be alone; now I was being forced to speak to Diane Sawyer there and cry in front of the entire nation, at the behest of her father, she wrote.
“I shouldnt have been forced to speak on national TV, forced to cry in front of this stranger, a woman who was relentlessly going after me with harsh question after harsh question. Instead, I felt like I had been exploited, set up in front of the whole world.”
The book is dedicated to her two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden. She revealed that she went along with the conservatorship and her father’s wishes at times just so she would be allowed to see them.
“My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make,” Spears wrote.
TMX contributed to this article.
