“I wasn’t good – I was great.”

These were the words uttered by Britney Spears during her now infamous statement to Los Angeles probate judge Brenda Penny in June 2021, during which she recounted the 13 years of alleged abuse she had suffered during the conservatorship. Spears was speaking about her output in rehearsals for a cancelled Las Vegas Residency, Domination, a residency she had no desire to do but was forced to prepare for regardless. And while Spears shared far more shocking and upsetting details during her testimony, for many fans, it was these words that calcified.

This phrase resonated once again while reading Spears’ highly anticipated memoir The Woman In Me. Pre-publication, and thanks to early leaks, a lot has been made of the book’s revelations regarding Spears’ relationship with fellow singer and Trolls fan Justin Timberlake, as well as the troubling family dynamics that ultimately led her to become a prisoner in her own life. It’s perhaps understandable: Spears is one of the most famous people on the planet, the architect behind some of the 21st century’s most iconic pop culture moments. Of course there will be those reading for the Hollywood tidbits, juicy anecdotes lifted the annals of 00s celebrity culture, soundbites about time spent in Swedish recording studios, the truth about Original Doll and “Rebellion”, and the answer to what really happened to Britney Spears in 2007.

You will find much, although not all, of this information in the pages of The Woman In Me. However, as Spears herself writes about fame, “That world isn’t real, my friends… For me, there was an essence of real life missing from it.” By simply plucking out the salaciousness you risk obscuring, and undermining, the narrative Spears is trying to tell: a cautionary tale about coercion, misogyny, control, exploitation, and the insidious grip of the patriarchy.

Spears shares this story, which will undoubtedly be dissected and recounted elsewhere, with astonishing clarity. It begins with her difficult childhood growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, and details her ascent to pop stardom, the relentless press criticism, the difficulties she suffered following the birth of her two children, her distressing relationship with her family, the formation of the conservatorship and the #FreeBritney movement that helped liberate her. It’s a harrowing read and a scathing indictment of an entire industry predicated on the manipulation, demonisation and commodification of young women.

However, there is another story found in The Woman In Me that likely won’t get as much attention: the devastating erosion of Britney Spears as an artist. For as long as Spears has been releasing music, her credentials as an artist have been questioned. Reading The Woman In Me, though, provides an insight into the significant role that music and self-expression have played for Spears throughout her life.

Spears escapes into music early. Her early childhood was filled with parental conflict and coloured by her father’s alcoholism. “Music stopped the noise,” she writes, “made me feel confident, and took me to a pure place of expressing myself exactly as I wanted to be seen and heard… As long as I was singing, I was half outside the world.”

She recounts the development of her career, from her turn on The Mickey Mouse Club to the release of “...Baby One More Time”, with a light touch; for Spears, her ascent to fame was secondary compared to her drive to perform. “If anyone was able to put something together for me that presented me in a format people could relate to, I was ready,” she explains, demonstrating a shrewd self-awareness that in order to fulfil her take on the American Dream she would, in some way, have to contort herself in order to succeed.

“Music stopped the noise,” she writes, “made me feel confident… As long as I was singing, I was half outside the world”

Regardless, her focus was her craft. She writes about losing herself in the recording studio and waxes lyrical about the differences between dancers from LA and New York, the latter of whom she suggests “have more heart”. “That’s probably the moment in my life when I had the most passion for music,” she writes of the period before the release of her debut album. “I was unknown, and I had nothing to lose if I messed up. There was so much freedom in being anonymous.”

Soon, though, Spears demonstrates how that fulfilling sense of artistry was slowly suppressed. Liberating performances were soured by a media culture intent on criticising her self-expression and questioning her authenticity. “I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing – a Bob Dylan impression?” she writes, exasperation leaping from the page. “I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?”

The scrutiny surrounding her relationship with Timberlake also distracted from Spears’ artistry. Despite suggestions that he was unfaithful to her on numerous occasions through their time together, it was Timberlake who weaponised Spears’ retaliatory fling with choreographer Wade Robson. He used her infidelity “as ammunition for his record”, she argues, adding that Timberlake ultimately ended their relationship over text while she was on the set of a music video: “I had to go back out and dance,” she writes.

The breakup left Spears devastated. But while she “was comatose in Louisiana” feeling increasingly distant from her family, who were beginning to see her less as a person and more as a meal ticket, Timberlake was “happily running around Hollywood” painting Spears “as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy”. Aware no one would take her side, Spears kept quiet. “I don’t think Justin realised the power he had in shaming me,” she writes. “I don’t think he understands to this day.”

Despite this emotional turmoil, Spears was contractually obliged to continue touring. And when she did produce work that she was proud of, like her 2003 album In The Zone, the time to revel in artistic glory was snatched away by her father, who showed up at her New York apartment with a group of henchmen to question her about her behaviour. As a result of this visit, she was forced to do a now infamous interview with Diane Sawyer, in which she was grilled like a war criminal. “That interview was a breaking point for me internally,” Spears writes, noting that she felt exploited. “I felt something dark come over my body… It seemed like nobody really cared how I felt.”

Clearly in a tailspin, Spears found herself once again forced out on tour. She says she felt manipulated to continue working following the split with Timberlake, and describes “The Onyx Hotel Tour” as “depressing”. “I’d already started to check out,” she writes. “I was craving some lightness and joy in my life.”

When Kevin Federline appeared in Spears’ life, he offered just that. The levity of that relationship encouraged her to take control of her life. After the tour was cancelled due to injury, she fired her management team and took some time off. Spears married Federline and the pair had two children. But as she grappled with new motherhood, a rift grew between her and her husband. Federline had become obsessed with fame and his hopes for a rap career. “I’ve seen fame and money ruin people,” Spears writes, “and I saw it happen with Kevin in slow motion.”

“I don’t think Justin realised the power he had in shaming me,” Spears writes. “I don’t think he understands to this day”

As her marriage broke down, Spears says she found solace by working on her album Blackout. It was “a battle cry”, a rejection of the carefully curated image that she had conformed to order to please her parents: “It was my time to say ‘Fuck you’.” This attitude, she says, drew creative people into her orbit. Despite the chaos that was her personal life, Blackout was “one of the easiest and most satisfying albums I ever made”. 

The album was also met with almost unanimous critical acclaim (it’s worth noting that it remains the only album on which Spears is the sole executive producer) and remains the thing Spears says she is most proud of in her career. It was unfortunate, however, that at the time of its release she was suffering so much personally. Following the end of her marriage with Federline, he successfully sued her for custody of her children. Spears was adrift with grief: “I was hell on wheels,” she writes.

Spears was hospitalised against her will at the beginning of 2008 and was placed under the conservatorship, a legal arrangement reserved for those deemed unable to care for themselves. Her father was put in charge of her finances and her personal care; as he said to her, “I am Britney Spears now.”

Access to her children was held over Spears; if she didn’t follow the rules of the conservatorship, her boys would be taken away. “It was a trade I was willing to make,” she writes. Within weeks of the arrangement being set up, she was working again. She went out on lucrative world tours and recorded multiple albums. Throughout it all, Spears was robotic. “The fire inside me had burned out,” she writes. “I had become more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

For those involved in the conservatorship, Spears was a mechanism for making money. As long as she could be packaged and sold, the quality of the work was superfluous. Watching performances Spears did during that time, and the disaster that was her 2013 album Britney Jean, it’s clear that she knew it. In fact, phoning it in was a form of rebellion for her. “Toning down my energy onstage was my own version of a factory slowdown,” she writes.

Every so often, though, glimmers of the electric performer Spears used to be would break through; as much as she writes about losing her passion, that innate sense of artistry remained. Indeed, she writes repeatedly about her attempts to reinvigorate her five-year Las Vegas residency, despite knowing that her requests will go ignored, and of the energising force that was writing and recording her album Glory. “There were pieces of me that began to awaken again,” she writes of that period in 2016. “I was able to tap back into that connection between a performance and an audience.”

For Spears, gasping the air of artistic integrity ignited something within: “I swore to do everything I could to escape,” she writes. The result of this rebellion, however, was catastrophic. In 2019, Spears was sent to a mental health facility against her will and put on lithium. Her account of this time is the most harrowing and desperate moment in The Woman In Me.

Spears would ultimately get her freedom. In 2021, nearly 14 years after it was first put in place, the conservatorship that had controlled her life was finally dissolved. Her life now is her own; as she writes: “Pushing forward in my music career is not the focus at the moment… It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”

Whether Spears will share her artistry with the world again is a question only she can answer. Nevertheless, reading The Woman In Me, you’re reminded of how potent and seductive that artistry could be. When given the creative freedom to flex, Britney Spears was an undeniable performer, driven simply by the necessity to express herself. She didn’t, and likely doesn’t, care who was watching, as long as she was in control. “What I love is sweat on the floor during rehearsals,” she writes at one point. “I love the work. I like the practicing. That has more authenticity and value than anything else.” Britney Spears wasn’t good. She was great.

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