The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
An Autobiography
Title: The Woman in Me
Author: Britney Spears
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Year: 2023
ISBN: 9781668009048
Rating: 4 stars
On April 8th, 2000 at the age of 7, I was invited by my best friend at the time to go to a concert with her and her family, but this wasn’t just any concert, this was Britney Spears. THE Britney Spears. We made up dance routines to her songs. “Stronger” and “Lucky” were my anthems (what I had overcome by the ripe old age of 7 I don’t know). And I thought the Titanic reference in “Oops…I Did It Again” was so cultured (I also don’t know why I had seen Titanic at the age of 7). To be perfectly honest, I remember two things about the concert: 1. before the concert my friend’s dad had a talk with us about how the live performance might not match the CD recording we knew so well, 2. at some point in the concert she flew out over the audience on a magic carpet. There is a later concert from the tour on YouTube and rewatching it as an adult, I’m realizing that since it was my first ever concert, it was lost on me how much of a PERFORMANCE that show really was (and there is no magic carpet in the concert video, so maybe I’m misremembering that?). As I got older, my taste in music changed a lot, but even when I wasn’t an active Britney fan, I respected her as a performer. Over the past few years, I’ve started to care less about celebrity gossip, so I didn’t hear about her conservatorship until almost the very end, but I could see why so many people were concerned for her. When her autobiography came out earlier this year, I knew I wanted to read it.
The book starts with Britney’s childhood in Louisiana and Mississippi. She describes being close with her older brother and the constant fighting between her mother and her alcoholic father. She describes herself as shy, but loving to perform in her dance classes, singing in church, and on the basketball court. The book follows her through her entrance into the entertainment industry and her meteoric rise to fame, relationship with Justin Timberlake, her marriages, her children, her sister’s rise to fame, her Vegas residency, and the controversial conservatorship Britney was placed under by her father for thirteen years. The most juicy tidbits of the book were splashed across the media when the book was first published, so if you’ve heard anything about this book, you’ve already seen the Spark Notes.
The writing in this book wasn’t stellar. In the beginning especially, the sentences are short and choppy and at times felt disjointed. It gets better as the book progresses, but it was a little challenging to get in to. Almost no celebrities actually write their own memoirs, the majority of them work with a ghost writer who does most of the writing, but for the first few pages, I was almost positive Britney wrote the book herself. I guess the ghost writer was really just that good (to be bad)? The book was ghostwritten by Sam Lansky, a journalist with some pretty impressive bylines. I’m not familiar with any of his work off the top of my head, but based on his CV, I have to believe that the writing style is intentional. However, her story is very compelling and the content makes up for the flow that the writing lacks.
Shockingly, this book reminded me a lot of Spare, the memoir by the monarch formerly known as Prince Harry, which I also read this year. Both books deal with very public splits within families wherein both sides have money and access to the best PR and publicity professionals to help them spin their stories in the most sympathetic way. In these types of situations, both sides are trying win in a court of public opinion and have the help and skills to manipulate the story. As a person on the outside just hearing what they want you to hear, it’s hard to tell where the objective truth lies. In this case, there is no doubt in my mind that throughout her career Britney has been manipulated, taken advantage of, and both sexualized and then demonized for her sexuality. I know given some of Britney’s recent social media posts some people that were originally against the conservatorship have changed their opinions and some of the events recounted in the book left me with questions because they didn’t seem realistic. At the end of the day, I don’t really think it’s up to me to decide and I realize that my opinion doesn’t matter much on the topic. Both books also talked a lot about the media and paparazzi and how much, if any, privacy public figures and celebrities are entitled to. This is again another issue that I’m not sure my opinion on matters, but in both books, children are heavily impacted by paparazzi and lives are put at stake, which sounds like it’s going too far to me.
If you’ve heard anything about this book, you’ve likely heard that Britney says that she got pregnant while she was with Justin Timberlake and he didn’t want the baby. She was too famous to go to an abortion clinic, so she did a self-medicated abortion in their home. She didn’t really want to have the abortion and she ended up alone and scared laying on their bathroom floor in agony. At that point, Justin came into the bathroom with his guitar and played for her while she suffered. A lot of people were angry at her for saying these negative things about Justin, but he has always kind of seemed like an ass to me, so I’m willing to believe it. For me, this story just proved that every woman has experienced the thing from the Barbie movie where a man just plays music at you.
I was able to read this book in a couple of hours. I think it does bring up some important topics like the sexualizing of children and teens (especially young girls) in Hollywood and the music industry and personal privacy. I don’t know for sure what to believe, but it seems objectively clear that Britney Spears hasn’t had an easy time of it and that her fame has come at a great cost to her.