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.
