Britney Spears holds nothing back in her short, bittersweet and extremely powerful memoir. Once America’s teen-pop princess, she reveals that she was drinking, smoking and having sex by the time she was 14. She went through a horrific home abortion at the behest of fellow teen-pop idol Justin Timberlake, bent over a toilet bowl howling without anesthesia, and in so much pain she thought she was going to die, while Timberlake tried to comfort her by strumming some acoustic guitar.
The somewhat vainglorious Timberlake doesn’t even come across as the worst man in her life. Spears writes that she has been taken advantage of by narcissistic self-serving boyfriends, hounded by paparazzi, and (she alleges) ruthlessly exploited by her father Jamie while the male-dominated music business and even her own family turned a blind eye to her suffering.
The real story of The Woman in Me is how Spears has survived an experience that she specifically likens to a witch trial – a form of gaslighting through which women have been going for centuries – when signs of independence, eccentricity and creativity, not to mention anger and depression at their own powerlessness, are interpreted as mental illness, and used as an excuse to lock them away and control their lives. This is the forensically convincing account of the madwoman in the attic of pop. And it is not pretty.
Spears shoots her parents down cold on the opening page: “When I was growing up, my mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared at home.” Her family life is tainted by Jamie’s alcoholism and bankruptcies, and her mother Lynne’s screaming rages. As a people-pleasing child performer – she appeared in theatrical musicals and TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club before achieving pop stardom – Britney becomes the main breadwinner at an early age. For her, music is an almost spiritual escape, the place where she can be most creatively herself. She buys her family a new home, and pays off her father’s debts.
But just when she feels as though she’s on top of her own world, a sequence of bad romances, a long post-partum depression and a brutal divorce give her father what she portrays as an opportunity to reassert control. Having successfully filed for conservatorship and had Spears put into rehab against her will, he inserts himself in her office and chillingly tells her: “I’m Britney Spears now.”
The real story of The Woman in Me is how Britney Spears has survived an experience that she specifically likens to a witch trial.
There is some light relief to be had in this book. Spears recounts a brief affair with film star Colin Farrell as a “two-week brawl. We were all over each other, grappling so passionately [that] it was like we were in a street fight.” Spears is good at telling offhand anecdotes that make ex-boyfriends and husbands look silly, such as when wannabe bad boy Timberlake goes weak at the knees in front of rapper Ginuwine, braying: “Oh yeah, fo shiz, fo shiz! Ginuwiiiiine! What’s up, homie?” Female stars such as Mariah Carey and (in particular) Madonna come across in a better light, the latter providing emotional support and inspiration to Spears when it’s most needed. (Their famous kiss at the 2003 VMA Awards turns out to have been very much Spears’s doing.)
Yet the double standards faced by male and female artists is a constant undercurrent, pulsing through a book fired by anger at Spears’s mistreatment. “I was so nerdy that I kept all my receipts in a bowl. I knew musicians who did heroin, got in fist-fights, and threw TVs out of hotel windows. Not only didn’t I steal anything or hurt anyone or do hard drugs – I was keeping charge of my tax deductions.”
Yet for 13 years, she was put under a regime that controlled every aspect of “my body and my life”, having to give two hours’ notice to security guards before leaving her room while on tour, and being sent to Alcoholics Anonymous four times a week for the sin of legally taking over-the-counter energy drinks while she exercised. She describes herself as turning into “a child robot” and “a wind-up doll”, and having been driven close to suicidal thoughts. The notorious incident where she shaved her head in front of paparazzi is explained not as an act of lunacy but as a wild assertion of control.
Ultimately, The Woman in Me is a story not about music so much as about the way that women are still routinely mistreated in the music business. That it hasn’t turned into a complete tragedy is a testament to Spears’s essential fortitude of spirit – something that burns off these pages.
Neil McCormick is a music journalist, the chief music critic for The Daily Telegraph, and author of several books, including Killing Bono
