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Britney Spears’ long-awaited memoir, The woman in me, won’t hit shelves until Tuesday, but excerpts have already started appearing online. In the book, Spears covers everything from her days at the Mickey Mouse Club, to drinking with her mom as an eighth grader, to falling in love as a teenage pop star, to marriage and divorce, and of course life under conservatorship.
“For the past 15 years or even the beginning of my career, I’ve sat while people talked about me and told my story for me,” Spears said. people via e-mail. “It’s finally time for me to raise my voice and speak, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracies, no more lies – just owning my past, present and future.”
Unnamed publishing sources said the book is clearly “not a rip-off” of anyone, but a way for Spears to tell her own life story. At the same time, some people do better than others in the run-up to the announcement.
Here are some things we’ve learned from the memoir so far.
On social media and in a damning court statement, Spears spoke out about the conservatorship that controlled every aspect of her life for 13 years, starting when she was 26. In the memoir, however, she goes into more detail, not only about certain restrictions the arrangement placed on her life — it reportedly required her to exercise, have long hair and take certain medications she didn’t want to take — but also about the emotional toll it took on her. In one instance, she recalls feeling like a “robot child.”
“I was so infantilized that I was losing parts of what made me feel like myself,” Spears writes. “Conservatory deprived me of my femininity, made me a child. On stage I became more of an entity than a person. I have always felt music in my bones and in my blood; they stole that from me.”
In 2007, in the midst of a difficult and aggressively publicized divorce, Spears surprised the paparazzi by appearing at a salon in Los Angeles and shaving off all her hair. The tabloids plastered her face on their covers and portrayed her as a woman in the midst of a breakdown. In her memoirs, she writes that she buzzed her head as a way to “push off” and take what little control over her life she could. “I was watched so much when I was growing up. I was looked at from head to toe, people told me what they thought of my body, because I was a teenager,” she explains. “Shaving my head and acting were my ways of pushing myself away.”
But soon after, her family made a decision about conservatorship, and the singer “made it known that those days are now over,” she wrote. “I had to grow my hair and get back in shape. I had to go to bed early and take all the medicine they told me to take.”
Although she’s rarely discussed her relationship with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake in public, Spears is clearly sparing few details here. Allegedly, it says that they first kissed on a dare, as teenagers at a sleepover; they would end up continuing to date for three years.
While they were together, Spears believed they would get married. And in the excerpt he published people on Tuesday, Spears recalls finding out she was pregnant. “It was a surprise, but for me it was not a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected that one day we would have a family together. That would be much earlier than I expected,” she writes, trans Folk excerpt. Ultimately, though, Spears says she miscarried because Justin “didn’t want to be a father.”
“Justin was definitely not happy about the pregnancy,” reads the expert. “He said we weren’t ready to have a child in our lives, that we were too young.” The couple would have been in their late teens or early 20s at the time.
According to TMZ, Spears also writes that despite their breakup story that she cheated on Timberlake — fueled in part by Timberlake himself — he actually cheated on her, with another famous woman she won’t name. Spears admitted she kissed choreographer Wade Robson while the pair were together, but claims she and Timberlake “agreed to call it quits” because she “only had eyes for him.”
According to USA TodaySpears wrote it during the filming of the movie Intersectionshe got into character a little too much, which made her realize she didn’t want to be an actress. Intersection it was “about the beginning and the end of my acting career, and I was relieved,” she says. She also reveals that she almost got the role Notebook, who “reached out to me and Rachel McAdams,” according to Spears. “Although it would be fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time together The Mickey Mouse ClubI’m glad I didn’t.”
Per peopleSpears writes that the years she spent in Louisiana after The Mickey Mouse Club wrapped were “beautifully normal” or “as close to ‘normal’ as possible in my family.” During that time, Spears recalls going to homecoming and prom, going to the movies and driving around her town. She also remembers a cocktail party with her mom when she was in the eighth grade.
“I liked that I could drink with my mom from time to time,” she recalls. “The way we drank was nothing like the way my father did it. When he drank, he became more depressed and withdrawn. We became happier, more alive and more adventurous.”
