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?
Or to put it more expressly in Joseph Heller’s terms: the actions taken by Spears in response to the madness around her – to shave her head, attack snappers and act, as her own family cynically characterised it, “crazy” – were, in the circumstances, only proof of her sanity. Who in Spears’s place wouldn’t push back against being poked, prodded, forced on a diet, ridiculed and controlled since her teens by leaning into a series of performative episodes in which she stuck two fingers up at all the people who “owned” her? These were the normal responses of a young woman under intense pressure on the receiving end of multiple forms of gaslighting and abuse. Instead, as Spears documents in the book in what is perhaps the most mind-boggling detail of all, a Swat team was called in to rip away her children and subdue her.
The thing I found myself thinking about this, and similar stories from the book, was: why did that Swat team show up? Why was everyone so complicit in the narrative around Spears? The truly weird and sinister thing about this history is that, with the exception of a hardcore of Britney’s fans, the story put out by Spears’s family was broadly, publicly accepted. A strange kind of birdcage is portrayed, a Las Vegas residency, which Spears’s father forced her to take up, generating millions for himself and his cronies and from which Spears herself was given a relatively small stipend. It made no sense whatsoever that someone capable of pulling off those performances was sufficiently impaired to require a conservatorship. And yet the picture as it most commonly clarified was: Britney’s nuts.
It’s hard, looking back, not to find the roots of all this in a generalised hatred of women, particularly young ones with sexual energy and power. Spears’s father, Jamie, a failed businessman, clearly had financial incentives to keep the conservatorship going, but one wonders more at the emotional needs it fulfilled. The conservatorship finally ended after a court ruling in 2022, and on the back of an intense and very successful “Free Britney” campaign by her fans. That movement, one that was received publicly in the first instance as a joke, became grimmer and grimmer, the more serious interest it attracted. Now, as in so many stories involving the abuse of young women, the whole saga has an “in plain sight” vibe about it. How could any of this possibly have happened?
Meanwhile, Spears is “free”. In the book, she writes about how hard she found it to recalibrate after being publicly embarrassed by Timberlake in the early 2000s, leaning too heavily during her 2004 tour into a sexual persona she feels Timberlake himself helped create. “It was absolutely horrible,” writes Spears, and there are traces, still, of many of the old versions of herself that other people shaped and created. They present differently today, however. The best indication that Spears is free is that, day to day, her image goes this way and that way, unfiltered and off-message, dictated by no one but herself. It is gloriously unstable.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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