The Princess of Pop is actually the Queen of Tragedy: what we learnt from Britney Spears' memoir

Britney Spears was, in many ways, patient zero for the collective destruction of a female celebrity. She was part-fed, part-devoured by the entertainment industry and media alike in a parasitic relationship that left her entirely robbed of agency. We—guilty by association perhaps—lapped it up, and now that our social mores have shifted (with chants of ‘Free Britney’ replacing our tutting at her ‘off the rails’ behaviour), we are just as ready to lap up her story again. Except, this time, it's in her own words.

For has there been a memoir more breathlessly awaited than The Woman in Me? Now that I’ve read it, I can say that it was worth the wait. For one of the most fundamental tragedies of Britney Spears—and this book is at times painfully sad—is that everyone has always spoken about her, for her. Now she is speaking for herself—in plain, simple, affective words. (As she herself jokes in the acknowledgements: “if you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?”)

The idea of who Britney Spears is, who others made her, who people wished she was or needed her to be is a relentless motif in this book. There's the ‘virgin’ moniker she was asked to play into, despite the fact she reveals she had been having sex since she was 14 and had, of course, been openly living with Justin Timberlake for years. The label of the highly sexualised, unattainable ‘virgin’ was foisted upon her and then turned into a stick to beat her with. It becomes a pattern for how she will be treated going forward: perceived as fragile, treated as dangerous.

Spears’ story is not just the cautionary tale of the media age but, as she repeats again and again in this book, a story that quite simply would never have happened to a man. Spears was squeezed into impossible contradictions and held to impossible standards that—despite the difference in circumstances—will seem familiar to any woman. The commentary on her motherhood is barbaric in its double standards; the commentary on her body and behaviour is the same. She cites male rock stars doing heroin and throwing TVs out of windows while she was busy storing all her receipts in a bowl (“keeping track of my tax deductions”). Yet she was the one labelled “crazy”; she was the one who was punished because she had failed to be the Britney Spears we needed her to be. As she plaintively cries in the book: “At what point did I promise to stay 17 for the rest of my life?”

She opens the book with stories of tragedy within her family that read like a Southern Gothic novel. Intriguingly, almost all of these stories of abuse, grief and madness (or perceived madness) centre on the women in her family. Particular attention is paid to her grandmother, whose middle name she shares. Everyone said how alike they look and, with each crushing blow that befalls her ancestor, you get the sickening sense that history is repeating itself.

At one point, Spears actually admits to believing in some sort of nominative determinism, that she was destined for misery. The crux of this is her first true heartbreak and the end of her much-publicised relationship with Justin Timberlake. In many ways, their break-up is the disaster that starts a domino effect, leading all the way to her conservatorship. Indeed, it is a microcosm of all the complex tragedies of Britney Spears; a woman out of kilter with her media perception, a cash cow unable to rest and grieve, a young woman sacrificed for a man’s fame and fortune. It is the template which will start to feel like the pattern of the Spears women from her family tree, another story she believes about herself: “Justin framed our time together with me as the bad guy. I believed it, so ever since then I’ve felt like I'm under a sort of curse.”

Make no mistake about it, Justin Timberlake does not come out of this book well. There is almost a direct thoroughfare from a 10-year-old Spears telling Ed McMahon on Star Search that she doesn’t have a boyfriend because “boys are mean” and what transpires between her and Timberlake. There is cheating, a pressured abortion, a break-up over text—all of it horrible to read—but the guileless way she speaks about loving him and then feeling wrecked and abandoned by him, is affecting for its simplicity. The merciless way she was treated by the press afterwards, and how silenced she felt by a false narrative parading in front of her, seemingly unstoppable, feels like the beginning of the end. “I don’t think Justin realised the power he had in shaming me,” she writes. “I don’t think he understands to this day.”

When Spears sang “I’m not that innocent”, she actually was. That’s a huge takeaway from the book, and a revelation she had about herself within its pages. What Britney Spears is bad at is fame. She dissects this herself, saying how much she wished she could have been more like Jennifer Lopez, or other celebrities she thinks have done it right. Spears was not canny. She was powerful onstage and in a recording booth but nowhere else. There are myriad things she should have spoken up about, said no or yes to (she was offered the Chicago movie and tellingly says: “I would have gotten to play a villain who kills a man, and sings and dances while doing it too!”) and behaviour she should have called out. She knows this now, saying more than once that she was “too nice” and too trusting.

This trust and lack of guile aided the systemic gas-lighting of Britney Spears, which comes to a brutal apex with her conservatorship. It is the hardest read of the book and the most enraging. What is so successful about the chronological assessment of this time through her eyes—the head-shaving years—is how easy it is to witness the unspoken devastation and rage within her growing and growing. The whole world is condemning her for trying to survive through heartbreak, lies, postnatal depression and panic at the idea of losing her children. When she does lose them: to a man who seems to have exploited her for her fame and money, it is almost too terrible to read.

History—much like Spears’ own family background—teaches us that women have been systemically disempowered by being called crazy. It is a long shadow of misogyny that still darkens us today, but the level to which this successfully operated for 13 years in her life is beyond tragic. Forget the celebrity gossip, the chapters in which Spears details her solitary confinement and the degree to which her agency was stripped away from her are the real lessons to be learnt from this book; the harrowing miscarriage of justice applied to one of the most famous women in the world.

Yet it is not all gloom and doom. There are moments of genuine levity, particularly in her early years, and plenty of celebrities come off well: Madonna and Paris Hilton especially. One of the chief joys is Spears’ own peppering of deprecating wit. She pokes fun at her own lack of fashion sense and her wacky Instagram. She apologises to contractors for being obsessed with white marble and admits to loving that the Justin and Britney double denim look has become a Halloween costume.

For largely this is not an angry book (though the woman has more reason than most to be abjectly furious). Supposed takedowns, like Timberlake's, are not positioned as such. Even her anger towards her family is written in an almost dispassionate, matter-of-fact way. Spears may have moments of lyricism but this is a sparse and to-the-point book. It is purposeful. She is done plenty of dancing around the truth and is out for full on, self-penned rehabilitation. She may end up with a long list of called-out names by the book’s end, but this is not vengeance, or a memoir of retribution. Instead, it reads more like the long-overdue exhale of someone who has finally had their mouth untaped.

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar UK.