During the 13 years that Britney Spears’ life and career were strictly controlled by a conservatorship, there came a point when she gave up trying to fight it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me.” appear on Tuesday.
Her father, James P. Spears, was appointed to manage her affairs in 2008 after she was hospitalized twice for involuntary psychological evaluations. In the years that followed, she fought back privately at times, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two small sons won out, she recalls in the book.
“After I was held on a stretcher,” the memoir says, “I knew they could hold my body at any time. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for a nap with my kids – it was a trade I was willing to make.”
In the highly anticipated 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail outlet ahead of its authorized publication, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloids, her time under conservatorship and her eventual Push for termination in 2021 when she regained the right to make her own decisions.
Throughout, she describes feeling too much in the public eye and being under too much scrutiny, whether by her parents or the paparazzi or even by the doctors, who, she says, “take me away from my children , my dogs and my house.” But the story is inherently incomplete and gleefully references Spears’ post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after just over a year.
Below are other notable moments from the book.
Rise to fame
From her first solo – the Christmas song “What Child Is This?” – at her mother’s local daycare to auditioning Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears traces her meteoric rise to fame as a child and teenager.
When she was 10, she recalls being on the show “Star Search” where host Ed McMahon asked her if she had a boyfriend. After replying that they weren’t because they were “mean,” McMahon replied, “I’m not mean!” How about me?” She “held it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes , “but then I burst into tears.”
After her appearance on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided to live a “normal life” in Kentwood, Louisiana, until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer her mother met at the audition, suggested she take one demo on. At the age of 15 she got a record deal and Rudolph became her long-time manager.
Growing fame and attention
Spears quickly went from a mall-performing teenager to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single, “…Baby One More Time.” She toured with the boy band N Sync and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.
She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts were asking Timberlake different questions than the ones she was being asked: “Everyone kept making weird comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanted Whether or not I had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism eventually led to her starting taking Prozac, she recalls.
No more Timberlake
Spears describes her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup – which she said he initiated via text message – as leaving her “devastated” and dreaming of quitting show business.
She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders sadly in the rain.” She looked at the media as a “whore who had broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality, “I was in a coma in Louisiana and he was happily walking around Hollywood.”
According to excerpts published by People magazine earlier this week, Spears opened up about her decision to have an abortion after becoming pregnant during her relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy” but that he thought she was too young, which led her to agree “not to have the baby.”
After the breakup, Spears says she felt coerced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, in which Sawyer pressed her about what she had done to Timberlake that had caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a long-standing rumor when she says she kissed choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s infidelity.) Spears remembers this interview as “Focal point”. for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “put up in front of the eyes of the whole world.”
connection with drugs and alcohol
Spears delves into the highlights of her infamous paparazzi and tabloid career and writes about her early forays into partying and nightlife as an adult with a sense of disbelief at how they were portrayed in the media.
Spears writes about the time in which she was photographed with prominent colleagues such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan: “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be.” She had no interest in hard drugs and “never one had an alcohol problem.” .” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD drug Adderall, which “got me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it made me feel less depressed for a few hours.”
Spears writes that during some of her most high-profile public episodes—when she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo’s car—she was “crazy with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody battle with her ex-husband Kevin Federline. “Because my head was shaved, everyone was afraid of me, even my mother,” she writes. “During these weeks without my children, I kept losing my temper. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”
Spears adds, “I’m willing to admit that in the midst of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the agony of separation from my two babies, the death of my beloved Aunt Sandra, and the constant pressure of paparazzi, I began to fall in love “To think like a child in a way.”
The Conservatory
In early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed custodian of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an agreement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even when she went back to work as a singer, entertainer Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.
“I know I acted wildly, but there was nothing I did that would justify them treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justifies turning my whole life upside down.” She describes the decision as being made by her father, along with the support of her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied to be the architect of the conservatory. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an attempt to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)
“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows and perform in front of thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From Therefore, from then on, I began to believe that he saw me put on this earth for no other reason than to improve their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now. “
“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me pre-packaged envelopes of medication and watched as I took them. They installed parental controls for my iPhone. Everything was carefully examined and checked. Everything.”
Any resistance from Spears was frowned upon, ignored or downplayed, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”
Resistance and #FreeBritney
While Spears has at times unsuccessfully challenged the conservatorship behind closed doors, she attributes the beginning of the end of the agreement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she had to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab .
“My father said if I didn’t go I would have to go to court and I would be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to portray her as an “idiot.”
Spears says that not only was she prescribed lithium at the facility, but she was also only allowed to watch television for an hour before her bedtime of 9 p.m. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to donate blood weekly. I couldn’t bathe alone. I couldn’t close the door to my room.”
There, at a $60,000-a-month rehab in Beverly Hills, Spears says a nurse showed her clips from fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that questioned the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”
She writes, “It felt like every day there was another documentary about me on another streaming service” (including The New York Times’ “Framing Britney Spears”). “It was hard watching the documentaries about me,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but it hurt me that an old friend was talking to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds: “There were so many assumptions about what I was thinking or must have felt.”
When her father was removed as her conservator near the end of the agreement, “I felt a sense of relief wash over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had frightened me as a child and dominated me as an adult, who had done more to undermine my self-confidence than anyone else, was no longer in control of my life.” When she was told by her new lawyer, Mathew S When Rosengart received the call that the conservatorship was officially over, she was at a resort in Tahiti, according to Spears.
However, Spears continues to express anger over the aftermath of the conservatorship and writes about her ongoing estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I am no longer in the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage they have caused.”
A return to music?
While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’ life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatory was fatal to it; it shattered my soul.”
Spears writes that throughout her time as a revue performer in Las Vegas, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than give my fans the best possible performance.”
Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, she doesn’t feel motivated to do so, the singer writes, although she does mention a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Right now, I’m not in a position to pursue my music career,” says Spears. “It’s time for me to stop being someone other people want; It’s time to actually find myself.”
Chris Kuo contributed reporting.