Extracts from Britney Spears’ upcoming memoir have revealed startling personal details about her life, including the 13 years that she became a “shadow of herself” under the control of others, as well as an abortion she had while she was dating Justin Timberlake.
While Women’s Agenda is yet to read the book, published extracts have seen the pop legend opening up about some of the most extraordinary moments in her lif and career, including her father’s conservatorship arrangement, dancing with a snake at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards and when she shaved her head.
In the first of such extracts published by People magazine on Tuesday, Spears opens up about getting pregnant while she was dating Timberlake, with him not being “happy” about the news.
“For me, [the pregnancy] wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated.”
“But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young … I don’t know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
The pair began dating in 1999 when Spears was 18 and Timberlake was 19 and broke up in 2002 when she was 21 and he was 22. Timberlake, now 42, has not commented on Spears’ account.
Her conservatorship
“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself,” Spears wrote on the controversial period of conservatorship.
“I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick … I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.
“Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”
“I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me … I didn’t deserve what my family did to me … It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
In December 2022, Spears’ father, Jamie Spears, made the following statement about the issue:
“Where would Britney be right now without that conservatorship? … I don’t know if she’d be alive.”
“For protecting her, and also protecting the kids, conservatorship was a great tool. Without it, I don’t think she would have got the kids back.”
Shaving her head
In February 2007, Spears entered a salon in LA and shaved off her hair.
Spears writes how doing so was an opportunity to push back.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” she wrote in her memoir.
“Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.
“If I thought getting criticised about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.
“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”
Her first movie and what acting did to her mind
In 2002, Spears starred in her first film, Crossroads, which was slammed by critics.
“The experience wasn’t easy for me. My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind. I think I started Method acting — only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”
“I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads. Still, to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, She’s a little…quirky. If they thought that, they were right.”
“That was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved. The Notebook casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams and even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”
“I imagine there are people in the acting field who have dealt with something like that, where they had trouble separating themselves from a character.”
“I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
The Woman in Me is released in Australia on October 25, 2023.