The rollout this week of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me, seeks, among all the usual aspirations of the celebrity memoir, to execute a strange brief: to prove, finally and decisively, just how competent the 41-year-old is. Spears, who for 13 years toiled under the Grimms’ Fairy Tale-like curse of a conservatorship overseen by her father, has been legally in control of her life for 18 months. With the exaggerated care of someone trying to prove they’re not drunk, her appearances this week have seemed, at times, contrived to illustrate “independence”, “fun”, and an occasionally grim-looking levity in the service of convincing everyone she’s free and in charge.
The irony is that from the outside, the trajectory of the singer’s life and career looks like a classic catch-22 in which the central trauma is so profound that no single position in regards to it is preferable to another. In the book, Spears recounts how, from her earliest success as a 16-year-old pop star to her relationship with Justin Timberlake and the birth of the two children she had with Kevin Federline, she was harassed, taunted and belittled at every turn. The abuse took place within her own home and more resonantly without. Even after seeing the details of Spears’s life recalled and documented multiple times in recent years, this latest retelling still triggers incredulity: of the double standard between Spears’s and Timberlake’s early interviews (he is taken seriously as a music person, which is hilarious – it’s Justin Timberlake – while she is asked whether she’s had a boob job) and the unbelievable level of goading she suffered from paparazzi. Who, in these circumstances, wouldn’t freak out?
