Over the course of Britney Spears’ career, she was repeatedly subject to narratives constructed to disempower her. She was a teenage pop star presented as a virgin then scolded for a sexualised image sold by those same forces. After her breakup from Justin Timberlake, Spears was vilified and forced to undergo a grilling from Diane Sawyer so severe you might have thought she was a war criminal, not a double denim-wearing singer.
It made her suspicious of entertainment’s gendered double standard, she writes in her highly anticipated memoir, though that was nothing compared with the legal disfranchisement she later experienced. She was advised to divorce husband Kevin Federline to avoid the humiliation of him doing it first, only to take the flak for fracturing their young family. Her 2008 breakdown was conveniently framed as a sign of madness, not a proportional response to exploitation and losing custody of her children. Once she was placed under the conservatorship that would rule her life for 13 years, she became trapped further:
“If I became flustered, it was taken as evidence that I wasn’t improving,” she writes. “If I got upset and asserted myself, I was out of control and crazy.”
The contradiction reminds Spears of medieval witch trials, she writes in The Woman in Me. As the most famous young woman in the world, she admits she “never knew how to play the game”. But at 41, her understanding of these archetypes and their connection to wider systems of power is more astute than any of the tawdry spin that did her dirty.
Blimey … little did I know …
There’s lots more in the article and the book will, no doubt, be a fascinating read …
So sad , and so controlling , Im sure in this country it would never had been allowed .And yet the Courts in America played a big part in all of it …
Its messed her up big time , but at last shes in control , but she must find it hard to trust people now .
I don’t know her story, but her erratic actions at the time didn’t help her case. I remember seeing pictures of her shaving her head on the tabloids. I don’t buy tabloids or read tabloids, so for something to catch my attention at the grocery store as I’m checking out, it had to be something out of the ordinary. I remember thinking she needs help. The pictures of this looked pretty messed up. People can do whatever they want, but this looked like a plea for help.
I think the press was just being the press, hungry for any story that was sensationalized.
I know her father came out to be the ogre in the end, but she’s the only one getting to tell the story. I question whether she would have handled her assets better at the time. She sounded like she was having untreated bouts of mania that could have led to overspending.
In a world where public “tantrums” are splashed all over every publication, showing her in a poor light, I found it a little surprising that she would take this route.
I do feel sad for her for how things went, but it feels a little like revising history to imagine that people should have known better at the time. That only comes with 20/20 hindsight vision.
The Britney Spears memoir, a feverishly anticipated and by all accounts final rebuke to the decades of rumours that have surrounded the star, is rarely fun. It’s bleak, relentless and angry, a portrait of a woman no longer in the eye of the storm but surveying, dazed and indignant, the wreckage left in its wake.
Reportedly ghostwritten by an unbilled journalist named Sam Lansky, The Woman in Me doesn’t linger on Spears’s globe-conquering stardom, nor the conveyor belt of pop hits she has to her name, nor that multiple generations of people can probably point to the exact moment they first saw her on TV and gasped at the sight of an instant icon. Instead, it opens with a family suicide (of Spears’s grandmother) and only gets more dispiriting from there.
There are moments of glitz and glamour; Madonna and Donatella Versace swan in to briefly act as celebrity fairy godmothers, while rumours long baked into Britney lore are finally vindicated, from her belief that her sweaty, sozzled 2007 album Blackout is her magnum opus, to confirmation that her two-week fling with Colin Farrellwas as sexually explosive as everyone imagined. For the most part, though, this is a scorched-earth kiss-off to an incredibly dysfunctional family, a book so breath-taking in its rage that you can practically see the spittle on its pages.
This is no Beckham-type airbrushed version of a life then …
I have never taken much interest in “celebrity gossip” or the personal lives of celebrities and pop stars but the review of this book caught my attention. The summary of her life reads like an account of a woman who was being abusively controlled and used as a money-making machine for other people’s benefit.
After reading this review, it gave me enough of a glimpse into her life to make me feel so sad for her and angry with those who kept her working and earning money for them, even though she was clearly struggling mentally and emotionally.
It is shocking that her father was legally able to get away with some of the excessive controlling behaviour over her personal life.
