Book Review
Title: The Woman In Me by Britney Spears
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Rating: 5 Stars
After reading and loving a bunch of memoirs lately I decided to branch out a little, now while I avidly consumed Britney’s music in the early 2000s I haven’t listened to anything in years but the recent media storm surrounding her and her father had me intrigued so I decided to pick it up. This memoir is extremely short and from the first page I could tell this wasn’t going to be like the others I read since it isn’t as in-depth about Britney’s life which seems against the point of a memoir but it is working for me so far.
Britney had a troubled childhood because of her parents relationship. Her father was an alcoholic and often abandoned the family leading to huge arguments with her mother. Britney and her older brother Bryan had to grow up in this environment but her younger sister didn’t since she was very young in Britney’s rise to fame and had the security of her income including the house she bought for her parents. Also around the time Jamie Lynne was a tween her parents were divorced which added to her more normal childhood. Britney was very young when she stepped into the world of show business, working on the stage and in the Mickey Mouse Club with Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake. Britney’s career really took off with Baby One More Time and she skyrocketed enjoying the freedom and rebellion of fame while also trying to maintain a normal life.
She tried acting as well but found it really difficult to separate reality from fantasy and stayed away from it even turning down Chicago on Broadway although she regrets this now. By the time Britney hits her late teens, she was famous known all over the world, winning awards and dating her childhood crush, Justin Timberlake. Britney’s relationship with Justin was difficult as she was aware that he was cheating on her for a while but endured it but the final straw came when Britney found out she was pregnant. Being raised in the south, Britney doesn’t even consider getting rid of the baby but when Justin objects to becoming a parent she follows through with an abortion. Her memories about this and the pain she endured, not being allowed to go to the hospital was heartbreaking, even as an adult she recalls this pain and the mental scars it left vividly but the breakup left her extremely depressed and seemingly selectively mute which concerned the managers around her.
During the aftermath Britney tried to be normal for her age even getting married in a little white chapel after a wild night in Vegas, only to be treated like a disappointed by her parents even though she was financially supporting them at this point in her life. Shortly after Britney did get married properly for the first time and had two sons with him but from the moment she fell pregnant things became falling apart. Her husband who wanted to break into the music industry, spent a lot of time apart from the pregnant Britney which caused her a lot of anxiety and she became extremely overprotective when her first son was born, which was followed by quickly falling pregnant for the second time. Before she even gave birth to her second son, the marriage was over and when her children were still small she was tricked into filing for divorce which gave others the opportunity to exploit her using the children as weapons. This led to a drawn out custody battle and with Britney trying to be a single mother and dealing with postpartum depression, these things were then used against her in court to make her seem like an unfit parents and she lost custody of her children when the oldest was barely over a year old.
This directly tied into what most people know as the Britney meltdown but it wasn’t because of mental health issues as it was more to do with the fact she was sad and angry at losing her children and being kept away from them and that was her act of rebelling against the system. Britney did eventually gain joint custody of her boys but people were already looking to exploit her in more than one way and with it seeming to the public she was dealing with a lot of issues, her father used this as an opening. Having Britney declared mentally unfit to handle her own estate, her father placed her in a conservatorship meaning he had full control over everything she did and everything she earned. This was only the beginning of the nightmare for her as during the thirteen years she was under her father’s control, she was threatened with the loss of her children, restricted as an artist and even institutionalised more than once without cause.
Britney talks frankly about how her father treated her during this time and it was heartbreaking hearing it. Most of the time she went along with it because it meant she was allowed time with her children, which was her only escape. However, the more time passes, the more despondent Britney became even leading to the point where she questioned how she was still alive, believing that her family were going to kill her at some point. Luckily she did eventually reach a breaking point and it came when she was locked up in isolation for months without access to her children or the outside world, when a nurse showed her a video of her fans demanding she be freed. After this she found that last bit of fight in her to break the conservatorship and take control of her life and career back. Her now husband, Hesam Asghari was a massive support to her during this time and it explains why Britney hasn’t been seen or heard from much in recent years due to her father’s control which was only broken in 2022.
Overall, despite being quite short this was a heart-breaking and devastating read to learn of what Britney has gone through in her life and I understand and accept that we might never see her in the public eye again because of it. This woman deserves all the love and respect she gets and has always gotten because even when others would have given up, when I would have given up she found reserves of strength to draw upon and continue fighting. If you haven’t read this yet and you were a Britney fan back in the day or still are then definitely pick this up as it might change your perspective on all the headlines we used to read and your opinion on other celebrities as well.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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