Britney’s story will always feel like a cautionary tale

Charlotte Lytton, The Independent

Has any golden girl had their shine scrubbed off more forcibly than Britney Spears? The once double-denim-clad teen idol has spent most of the past two decades falling to earth in the most painful way possible, only managing to land (after several bumps…) in 2021, when she finally had her day in court.

Challenging the conservatorship that allowed her father control over her affairs for 13 years – an “abusive” set-up that included no decision-making powers over her own contraception, medication or work schedule – the “Free Britney” movement that her pitiful case sparked led to a loosening of shackles that she is ready to wave in full view of the world.

If the events of two years ago seemed desperately sad, the revelations in Spears’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” relive her agony in unbearable technicolour. The memoir – published this week, 25 years to the day that “…Baby One More Time” was released – begins with her grandmother’s suicide, and only becomes more harrowing. There is the abortion she had during her time as half of America’s golden couple with Justin Timberlake – which she “never would have done” if she were able to make the call herself, she writes. “Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father […] To this day, it’s one of the most agonising things I have ever experienced in my life.”

There was turbulent household she grew up in, where her parents “fought constantly”; being catapulted to fame at 12, when she was enlisted in the “boot camp” of the Mickey Mouse Club TV show (where she met Timberlake), drinking, smoking and driving, she says, by the following year. After they split in 2002, following infidelity on both sides, the world considered Spears the culprit for destroying the couple’s Noughties icon status, giving way to years of splashy tabloid front pages detailing her fling with Colin Farrell, her 55-hour marriage in Las Vegas, her nuptials with backing dancer Kevin Federline eight months later, which led to her bearing their two children, of whom she lost custody after the pair split.

In early 2007, having not seen her boys for “weeks”, she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella. “Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! […] But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief,” Spears says. There is more heartache within her autobiography’s 288 pages – and perhaps more still outside of them. Her family relations are shattered, her love of performing gone. She has separated from her latest partner, Sam Asghari, and is reportedly estranged from her sons. It is all achingly grim – but it is also Spears in her own words, for the first time in three decades.

If any aspiring child star can get through the book without being overcome by the urge to run as far from the Hollywood sign as humanly possible, one can only hope that Spears’s pain makes plain the realities that have, arguably, ruined her life. Things are on Spears’s terms now, she says – but that does not mean a return to the doe-eyed, bubblegum hair-bobbled girl of decades past. Who knows whether her love of music would have prevailed, had the last twentysomething years not happened; her only releases now are erratic Instagram posts, usually depicting her dancing with few clothes on (or, as was the case a few weeks ago, with knives). She no longer communicates with the world via lyrics, just a stream of quasi-consciousness told through social media captions, detailing private battles from her divorce to her social anxiety.

Perhaps the landscape has changed since Spears blazed an albino python-clad trail through it; today’s equivalent stars, like Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande, have fronted eponymous documentaries in which they could speak their minds. Spears was first afforded that same privilege only when she was a decade their senior. Now at least, she is free – or freer. But Spears’s story will always feel like a cautionary tale, rather than a happy ending.