A pop princess as a gothic heroine. That’s the bold storytelling strategy behind Britney Spears’ long-awaited memoir “The Woman in Me,” which became the literary sensation of 2023 and earned the singer up to $15 million. Unlike other celebrity memoirs, what matters in the book is not the tabloid-worthy revelations, but how it describes the singer’s descent into hell: it uses a voice far removed from the straightforward narration of similar works.
The book is full of subtle Gothic touches. It begins in Britney’s hometown in semi-rural Louisiana and follows her as she navigates the dirty entertainment industry. She’s like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, but this journey is more of a Lynchian nightmare. Whoever wrote the book – according to US press journalist Sam Lansky he was the ghostwriter – he handles the Gothic leitmotif with exemplary skill. In the opening pages we are taken to the woods of Britney’s childhood, where she sought refuge from her alcoholic father and dimwitted mother. “As I lay still on those rocks, I felt God,” says the breathtaking prologue.
And that’s not the end of the gothic feeling. The Spears family home is described as “a madhouse” where she felt like “a ghost.” One day during her breakdown in the early 2000s, she writes: “I felt myself turning, almost like a werewolf, into a bad person.” Towards the end of the book, one remembers how her fans felt during the #FreeBritney movement gathered behind her in 2021, there is another hint of the paranormal: “I think I can feel the same way that someone in Nebraska feels, I think.” The connection with my fans left her unconscious realize I was in danger.”
Like other novels in the Gothic genre, “The Woman in Me” is about a woman who falls victim to manipulation and ridicule and at times doubts her own sanity. Just like the reader sometimes does. Is this damsel in distress delusional or is she lucid as she describes her mistreatment at the hands of a misogynistic system that saw her as an easy target because of her age and obvious fragility? “There is tragedy in my family,” she says, continuing the gothic subtext. Britney’s grandmother Jean committed suicide by shooting herself at the grave of her son, who died at the age of three. Like Britney, the granddaughter she would never meet, she fell into depression and was treated with lithium. It’s almost as if the singer is fulfilling a prophecy: her first name is Britney Jean.
Her other grandmother had emigrated from the United Kingdom to the American town of 2,000, where Britney grew up cleaning crabs in the family business. This transatlantic heritage made her feel like she came from a more sophisticated place – a London she unrealistically describes as “afternoon tea and museums”. But her life took a different direction: At 13, she was smoking cigarettes and drinking daiquiris with her mother, and at 14, she lost her virginity to her brother’s best friend (to the psychoanalysts in the room, she continued to sleep in the same bed). as her brother until “sixth grade”).
Britney Spears in a promotional image from 1998, months before the release of her first album.L. Busacca (WireImage)
In the truest sense of the word, the story of their downfall is at the heart of the book. It starts with her split from Justin Timberlake, who accused Britney of cheating on him. She was portrayed as “a whore who had broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” when in reality they had both cheated on each other. However, the backlash was anything but uniform. From that moment on she felt “under some kind of curse.” Things got worse from there. She married in Las Vegas and divorced two days later, another marriage ended with the loss of custody of her two children, there was her disastrous performance at the MTV Awards and her live breakdown when she hit her head on camera shaved. Shortly thereafter, her family placed her under legal guardianship to ensure that the goose that laid the golden eggs—on which everyone depended—did not lose everything. Britney spent 13 years under the yoke of her father, who controlled her schedule, her diet and even her birth control.
The book is reminiscent of various literary characters. Britney describes herself as an adult child who ends up becoming a child-adult, drawing comparisons to Benjamin Button. “In a way, they turned me into a teenager again,” she writes. She’s talking about her family, but it could be more general. In a country obsessed with knowing whether her hymen was still intact, she was tolerated as long as she pretended to be a virgin. But when it became clear that she wasn’t just using her genitals for reproduction, she was immediately expelled from the pop paradise.
This is also a reference to Hester, the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of an American Eve. Hawthorne also addressed the scourge of settler Puritanism in “The House of the Seven Gables,” which is about the Salem trials. It’s no coincidence that Britney compares herself to these women. “I had always heard about how people used to test whether someone was a witch. They would throw the woman into a pond. If she floated, she would be a witch and would be killed. If she sank, she was innocent, and, oh well. “She was dead either way.”
In one scene, the singer’s father tells her, “I am Britney Spears now,” completing the usurpation of her personality, another motif of the Gothic subgenre.
Britney Spears had her head shaved in 2007 amid a custody battle over her children. A few days later, she attacked the paparazzi with an umbrella.Cordon Press
While the reader is aware that the book is a literary construction – it’s clear from her chaotic messages on Instagram that she didn’t write it alone – we are convinced that we are listening to her voice . In this sense, Lansky’s work, as with Michelle Williams in the audiobook version, is admirable.
Despite possible contractual restrictions, the ghostwriter manages to put a personal stamp on the memoir while remaining true to Britney. It’s like a song made especially for her.
The most disturbing moment of Britney’s journey comes toward the end, when the singer leaves behind a broken doll and shares strange knife dance routines on Instagram. “I was born naked into this world,” she says. In other words, when she poses in revealing outfits, it’s not because she’s trying to appear sexy like she was when she was a teenager, but because she wants to return to that primal moment when anything was possible. And so she sails on, like a ship against the current, returning endlessly to its gloomy presence.
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