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From the beginning of her career, the public felt a certain sense of entitlement towards Britney Spears. As she cemented her place in the broader narrative of pop music history, her life became a lavish banquet for the tabloids. Everyone wanted to know everything about Britney – and in her memoir “The Woman in Me,” the singer finally gives them what they want.
But the book’s most revealing moments reveal how little was actually known about Spears’ life away from the cameras, what she gave to the world and what she took from it, and how the effects of those experiences are still alive within her. In 275 pages, Spears details her 13 years as a conservator, her parenting, complex relationships with previous partners, and how her connection to music has permanently changed.
Here are the key takeaways from “The Woman in Me,” out October 24th.
Her conservatory turned her into a “child robot.”“
“I became a robot. But not just a robot – a kind of child robot,” Spears wrote in “The Woman in Me,” describing the internal changes she went through during the 13 years she spent in a conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie Spears. “I had been so infantilized that I lost parts of what made me feel like myself.”
The singer likened the experience to the intense scrutiny from the press and public when she was a child star having to grow up in front of the world – but the same pressure coming from a parent was even worse. “If I thought being criticized in the press about my body was bad, it hurt me even more from my own father,” she explained. “He kept telling me that I looked fat and that I needed to do something about it.”
Before the conservatorship took effect, Spears attempted to fight back several times as pressure mounted around her. That’s what made her decide to shave her head in 2007. But when the hammer fell, she said: “It was made clear to me that those days were now over.”
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“Because my head was shaved, everyone was afraid of me, even my mother,” Spears wrote. “During these weeks without my children, I kept losing my temper. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.” She continued, “I’m willing to admit that in the midst of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the agony of being separated from my two babies, the death of my beloved Aunt Sandra and the constant pressure of the paparazzi I began to think like a child in some ways.”
Most of the time she couldn’t even escape the music, and when she took the stage in front of thousands of fans, she felt like it only distanced her further from her sense of personality. “The conservatory stripped me of my femininity and turned me into a child. I became more of an entity on stage than a person,” Spears wrote. “I had always felt music in my bones and blood; They stole that from me.”
She felt betrayed by Sister Jamie Lynn for telling her to “stop fighting the conservatorship.”
When Spears sensed that her parents were against her – her father controlled the guardianship and her mother agreed with her – she thought she could at least rely on her younger sister Jamie Lynn to be in her corner. But that was not the case. In 2018, ten years into her conservatorship, the singer contacted Jamie Lynn via text message after being placed in a psychiatric facility against her will. Her cry for help, she wrote, was met with the following response: “Stop fighting it…There’s nothing you can do about it, so stop fighting it.”
“This may sound crazy, but I’ll say it again because it’s the truth: I thought they were trying to kill me. “I didn’t understand how Jamie Lynn and our father could have such a good relationship,” she wrote. “She knew I was asking her for help and that she was stalking me. I felt like she should have been on my side.”
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Instead, Spears continued, “While I was fighting the conservatorship and receiving a lot of press attention, she wrote a book that capitalized on it. “She hastily told salacious stories about me, many of them hurtful and outrageous.”
Still, the singer said she hopes to one day mend her relationship with Jamie Lynn as part of her healing journey. “She will always be my sister and I love her and her beautiful family. “I’m working on feeling more compassion than anger toward her and anyone I feel has wronged me,” Spears wrote, adding, “It’s not that simple.”
She was “locked up against my will” when she found out about the #FreeBritney movement
Towards the end of 2018, Spears began to push back against the conservatorship, particularly her father’s role in it. Her efforts only resulted in him sending her to a rehabilitation facility in Beverly Hills that cost $60,000 a month. “My father said if I didn’t go I would have to go to court and I would be embarrassed,” Spears wrote, adding that Jamie Spears had threatened to portray her as an “idiot.”
While she was in rehab and “locked up against my will for months,” she learned about the people who were also fighting for her freedom as part of the #FreeBritney movement. “This was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life,” Spears wrote. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”
During rehab, the singer was forbidden from going outside, driving her car, closing her door, or bathing in private. She also had to donate blood weekly and was allowed to watch television for an hour every night and only before 9 p.m. The #FreeBritney movement, which was revealed to Spears by a nurse at the facility, was a glimpse into the outside world she was kept away from.
She struggled to feel supported and exposed amid the #FreeBritney movement
The fans behind the #FreeBritney movement wanted to do everything they could to bring Spears closer to her freedom. They analyzed her posts online for signs that she needed help, gathered in large protest groups and called for an end to the conservatorship. Their efforts have been boosted by the release of several documentaries on major streaming platforms, including Netflix and Hulu. But Spears struggled to keep her balance, feeling supported and exposed by the publications, none of which had her involvement.
“Watching the documentaries about me was hard. I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but it hurt me that an old friend spoke to the filmmakers without consulting me first… There were so many assumptions about what I must have thought or felt,” she wrote. “It felt like every day there was another documentary about me on another streaming service.”
Still, there was no one who made Spears feel more exploited than her father, who once declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.” She had previously tried to go public with her story through the conservatorship mentioned during an interview on a talk show in 2016, but the segment did not air.
“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 every week in a different part of the world,” Spears wrote. “From then on I started thinking that [Jamie Spears] saw that I was put on Earth for no other reason than to improve their cash flow.”
She lost her motivation to make music
When Spears’ conservatorship ended in a Los Angeles courtroom in 2021, she was finally free to make decisions on her own without outside interference. Towards the end of the legal battle, she celebrated being able to buy an iPad for herself. These were the kind of easy victories that had been robbed from Spears, but from the moment she was free, audiences were already hungry for new music. But for Spears, it was something that had been taken from her and would be much harder to get back.
“No, not really,” Spears wrote in response to suggestions that the conservatorship actually saved her life. “My music was my life, and the conservatory was fatal to it; It shattered my soul… Advancing my music career is not my focus right now. It’s time for me to stop being someone other people want; It’s time to actually find myself.”
It’s not that Spears wasn’t allowed to make music throughout the entire conservatorship. In fact, she released four albums and performed a residency in Las Vegas that included 248 shows. But her own creative and artistic voice was silenced. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she wrote, detailing her lack of control over the residency from 2013 to 2017. “It felt like you They wanted to embarrass me rather than give my fans the best possible performance.”
During her partying days, her drug of choice was Adderall
In the book, Spears explains that while she was never interested in hard drugs or excessive drinking, her “drug of choice” during her partying days was Adderall, the ADHD medication. “[It] Yes, it got me high, but what I found far more appealing was that it made me feel less depressed for a few hours,” she wrote, adding that her tabloid era “was never as wild as the press it represented”.
Although drugs and alcohol were not a significant point of harm for Spears, she admitted that she was “behaving wildly” around the time the conservatorship took shape in 2008. “They treated me like a bank robber,” she added. “Nothing that justifies turning my entire life upside down.”
From then on she was cut off from everything she had ever known. “I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears wrote. “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.”
Her relationship with Justin Timberlake wasn’t the pop perfection it presented to the public
One of The Woman in Me’s biggest hits was the revelation that Spears became pregnant in 2000 while dating her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake. The couple were both 19 at the time and Spears says it was Timberlake who really pushed her to terminate the pregnancy.
“It was a surprise, but for me it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected that one day we would start a family together. This was just going to happen a lot sooner than I expected,” Spears wrote. “But Justin was definitely not happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lifetime, we were way too young.”
She continued: “I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I never imagined having an abortion, but given the circumstances, that’s exactly what we did.” Reflecting on the decision to terminate the pregnancy, she added, “I don’t know if it was the right decision. If it had been left to me alone, I would never have done it. And yet Justin was so sure he didn’t want to be a father.”
“To this day, it’s one of the most excruciating things I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Spears described, explaining, “I cried and sobbed until it was all over.” It took hours and I can’t remember how ended, but twenty years later I remember the pain and fear.”
Spears and Timberlake had been dating for a year when she found out she was pregnant. They would stay together for two more years. Timberlake eventually initiated their breakup via text message and portrayed her as “a whore who had broken the heart of America’s golden boy” in the “Cry Me a River” music video.
“He started to be very distant towards me. I think it was because he had decided to use me as ammunition for his story, and so it was uncomfortable for him to be around me and address him with all that affection and devotion,” she recalls.
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“I felt like I had been exploited and exposed in front of the whole world,” Spears wrote, explaining that although she kissed choreographer Wade Robson while she was dating Timberlake, it was only in response to rumors about his own Infidelity happened. “There were a few times during our relationship that I knew Justin had cheated on me,” she explained. “Mostly because I was so in love and in love, I let it go, even though the tabloids seemed determined to rub it in my face.”
And while he cast a lookalike in the video for his breakthrough solo hit and “walked happily around Hollywood,” she wrote, she was “in a coma in Louisiana.”