The reason why I read celebrity memoirs is because every once in a while I stumble across some really good ones. I generally enjoy reading stories about people learning life lessons and if these are actually based on real life experiences, I manage to take away even more from them. I’ve had quite a lucky streak lately, having enjoyed “Will” by Will Smith, having been surprised by Pamela Anderson’s “Love, Pamela“, having loved Deborah Levy’s living autobiography and having been captivated by Matthew McConaughey’s “Greenlights“. When it came to “The Woman in Me” though, I was just shocked by the fact that anything of such quality would have even been published.

To start with the positive sides, it is understandable that a woman that has spent so many years in a conservatorship and who has been publicly judged by the media for such a long time wanted to set the records straight. She wanted to express her side of things and put it in writing. Similar to Pamela Anderson’s memoir, she also described the peak years of her fame as an extremely toxic environment in Hollywood, which would be surprising for anyone to come out of still staying sane. She illustrated how the constant critique towards one’s body image can completely break one’s spirit and also shared some details from her conservatorship which I haven’t heard of before.

“It was always incredible to me that so many people felt so comfortable talking about my body. It had started when I was young. Whether it was strangers in the media or within my own family, people seemed to experience my body as public property: something they could police, control, criticize, or use as a weapon. My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage. And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body.”

“My long hair was a big part of what people liked—I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot.
Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.”

On the other hand though, there were so many things that felt wrong about this book. Below are the 5 main points from my point of view, illustrated with quotes:

1. Even though the author wanted to be advocating the importance of the freedom from being judged, she ended up judging others quite a bit herself.

“When I made the wrong move, it was like my mother wasn’t concerned. She would share my every mistake on television, promoting her book. […] On another show, the audience clapped when she said my sister was pregnant at sixteen. That was classy as shit, apparently, because she was still with the father! Yes, how wonderful—she was married to her husband and having a baby at seventeen. They’re still together! Great! It doesn’t matter that she’s a child having a child!”

“And my little sister—well, when I tell you she was a total bitch, I’m not exaggerating.”

2. It was full of name dropping.
Sometimes you didn’t even understand why a specific celebrity was mentioned, especially because Britney mostly didn’t even seem to know them well as a person. It was disturbing and read like the thoughts of a teenage fan in her diary.

“As I became stronger and entered a new phase of my womanhood, I started to look around for examples of how to wield power in a positive way. Reese Witherspoon was a great example to me. She’s sweet and she’s nice, and she’s very smart.
[…] When I started to think that I could be, like Reese, someone who was nice but also strong, it changed my perspective on who I was.”

“I actually envy the people who know how to make fame work for them, because I hide from it. I get very shy. For example, Jennifer Lopez, from the beginning, struck me as someone who was very good at being famous—at indulging people’s interest in her but knowing where to draw lines. She always handled herself well. She always carried herself with dignity.”

“The disappointments in my romantic life were just one part of how isolated I became. I felt so awkward all the time.
I did try to be social. Natalie Portman—who I’d known since we were little girls in the New York theater circuit—and I even hosted a New Year’s Eve party together.
But it took a huge amount of effort. Most days, I couldn’t even bring myself to call a friend on the phone.”

3. A lot of stories were told that had neither any relevance for the plot, nor any emotional value and that should have been cut instead.

Every once in a while I was left wondering why a specific passage made it into the final version of the book, whereas no explanation or comment was provided to put a situation into context:

“I got 3.75 again. Marty got a perfect 4. I smiled and hugged him politely, and as I walked off, Ed wished me luck. I kept it together until I made it backstage—but then I burst into tears. Afterward, my mom got me a hot fudge sundae.”

“I was there talking with people, trying to make a good impression, and at one point I ran to go get Felicia and bring her out on the balcony. I didn’t realize that there was a screen door there. I ran straight into it, hit it with my nose, and fell back. Everyone looked up and saw me on the floor, holding my nose.
When I tell you I was embarrassed, I swear to God…
I got up and someone said, “You know there’s a screen there.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said.
Of course, everyone just laughed their little fannies off.
I was so embarrassed.”

4. The writing was horrible.

The whole book mostly read like a diary of a whiny teenager. For the fact that the information is out in the open about at least three ghostwriters having contributed to the book (Bernstein, 2023), it was an insult to the reader.

“Finally, after years of this, my mom told me, “Britney, now you’re almost in the sixth grade. You need to start sleeping by yourself!”
I said no.
I was such a baby—I did not want to sleep by myself. But she insisted, and finally I had to give in.”

“A few days after she came home with the baby, I was getting ready for a dance competition when my mother started acting strangely. She was hand-sewing a rip in my costume, but while working the needle and thread she just up and threw the costume away. She didn’t seem to know what she was doing. The costume was a piece of shit, frankly, but I needed it to compete.”

“One day I was with the photographer, driving my car fast, living so much. And then all of a sudden I was alone, doing nothing at all, not even always allowed access to my own cell phone. It was night and day.”

“It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance every night, which they deserved. Instead, I had to do the same show week in and week out: the same routines, the same songs, the same arrangements. I’d been doing this same kind of show for a long time. I was desperate to change it up, to give my wonderful, loyal fans a new and electrifying experience. But all I heard was ‘no’.”

5. A lot of shared details felt really disturbing without being reflected upon in the book.

Some thought patterns sounded like belonging to someone with serious mental health problems. Upon reading through the treatment that Britney has undergone during her conservatorship and multiple (in her opinion unjustified) stays in rehab clinics, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that she was not able to stay sane. It still gave me chills when I read phrases that sounded like she missed her dogs more than her sons, when she didn’t have a thought left for her children when almost being involved in a potentially fatal accident and that she thought it was normal to be in a relationship with a man that she would end up marrying and who didn’t do anything to help her get out of her conservatorship…

“When I finally got home, I cried when I saw my dogs—that’s how much I’d missed them. I started to plan a trip to take with the boys to make up for how much time we’d lost.”

“I looked at him; he looked at me.
“We could have just died,” I said.
I felt so alive.
As parents we’re always telling our children, “Stay safe. Don’t do this; don’t do that.” But even though safety is the most important thing, I also think it’s important to have awakenings and challenge ourselves to feel liberated, to be fearless and experience everything the world has to offer.”

“Hesam and I always pray together. I look up to him—his consistency with working out and being a good man and being healthy and taking care of me and helping me learn how we can take care of each other.
He’s such an inspiration and I’m grateful. The timing of the end of the conservatorship was perfect for our relationship; we were able to establish a new life together, without limitations, and get married. Our wedding was a beautiful celebration of how much we’d been through together and how deeply we wished for each other’s happiness.”

If your curiosity for “The Woman in Me” was sparked in the hopes of finding out more about Britney’s life behind the scenes, I think that you will be left disappointed. I felt like the majority of the information has already been circulating in the media and the book didn’t have much added value, especially since it was so poorly written. I didn’t expect much going into it and there was nothing positive that I have taken away from the reading experience. You might find out who Britney really lost her virginity to, her side of the story around the relationship with Justin Timberlake, some details about her conservatorship but not much more than that.

★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-1-3985-2252-7
Gallery Books, 2023}

Sources:

Bernstein, J. (2023): “The Many People Behind ‘The Woman in Me”. The New York Times. Last accessed: 13/02/2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/style/britney-spears-ghostwriters.html