After surviving three decades in the spotlight and 13 years in a conservatorship, Britney Spears is correcting the record. Excerpts from her upcoming memoir, The Woman and Me, tell the pop star’s side of all the stories, adding new dimensions to well-known tabloid fodder that often portrayed Spears in extreme terms. At the turn of the century, she was the Mickey Mouse Club’s eternal virgin, dating America’s Prince Charming and soon-to-be breakout member of the R&B-adjacent group ’N Sync. Her breakup with Justin Timberlake shattered her wholesome teen image, making her something of a femme fatale or “harlot†in the eyes of the public (Spears uses the more derogatory term). Her star had fallen by 2007. A troubled marriage with Kevin Federline and a shaved head, covered ad nauseam by the press, gave way to the court-ordered seizure of her personal and financial affairs.
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,†she told People in an email interview. “After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life.†In some ways, Spears does the book equivalent of her bare-it-all Instagram posts in The Woman in Me. Except this time, it’s not written in emoji. Below, the biggest revelations ahead of the memoir’s official October 24 release.
Dating Justin Timberlake wasn’t a fairy tale.
She and Timberlake reportedly had their first kiss at a sleepover in their teen years. Eventually, the couple got together for real and officially dated from 1999 to 2002. Spears thought they would last forever. When she realized she was pregnant, the couple chose abortion because Timberlake wasn’t yet “ready†to be a father. “It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much,†Spears remembers, per an excerpt from People. “I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated.†Timberlake “wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.â€
Their breakup left Spears “devastated.†The heartbreak, combined with the media perception that Spears was to blame, weighed heavily on the pop star, according to the New York Times. She was the “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,†she writes, when in fact: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.†She confirms that she kissed Wade Robson during their relationship and says Justin Timberlake cheated with an unnamed celebrity. The subsequent Diane Sawyer interview post-breakup made her feel even worse. “I felt like I had been exploited,†the book reads, “set up in front of the whole world.â€
Shaving her head was a way to “push back†against a leering public.
Spears noticed interviewers were comfortable asking her inappropriate questions at a young age. During her “… Baby One More Time†press tour, she “couldn’t help but notice†that she would get questions that were totally different from the ones her tourmate Timberlake would get. “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,†she writes, according to the New York Times, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.†The combination of public pressure and mounting fame led her to start taking Prozac.
The act of shaving her head was, in part, a way to take back control. “I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,†she recalls of the infamous moment in 2007 that made everyone, including her mom, “scared†of her. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.†It was also a symptom of the personal struggles she faced during her divorce from Federline, the custody battle, and the death of her aunt. “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.â€
Spears says she “never had a drinking problem,†nor was she interested in “hard drugs.â€
Her “drug of choice†was the ADHD medication Adderall, according to an excerpt from the New York Times. The drug “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.â€
Her conservatorship was harrowing.
California appointed her father, Jamie Spears, as her conservator in 2008 in the middle of her personal battles. She describes how her relatively unrestricted life became tightly controlled, per the New York Times report. “I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,†Britney writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.†It made her feel like a “child-robot.â€
“I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,†she writes in her memoir, per People. “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.â€
Her father put her in a Beverly Hills rehab facility in 2018 after the two had disputes over the conservatorship. “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 give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.†It was also where Britney learned about the Free Britney movement.
The documentaries “hurt.â€
“It felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service,†Britney recalls, according to the New York Times. “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough.†She also felt bad when she discovered that some of her friends spoke on the record without giving her a heads-up. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.†She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.â€