Britney Spears’ Memoirs: 8 Takeaways from ‘The Woman in Me’

Britney Spears is angry. Very, very angry.

“The Woman in Me,” the singer’s new memoir, is, of course, more than just an expression. She offers detailed and compelling accounts of humiliation that will make everyone see it. But over the course of her 41 years, Spears has clearly built up a lot of frustration—especially with the people who helped her become her conservator, including most of her family, and with the throngs of paparazzi who followed her nonstop.

And don’t get her started on Justin Timberlake. Not right now. But soon.

The book traces Spears’ life from childhood to the not-quite-present—it ends before her brief marriage to Sam Asghari ended—and begins with a list of relatives who showed signs of mental illness or alcoholism. Spears’ past is full of abusers and receivers, including her grandmother Jean, who fatally shot herself with a shotgun in 1966 at the grave of the son she lost three days after his birth. Jean was only 31 years old.

In short, Spears had no plan for a normal life, and a normal life is a far cry from the one she’s led since becoming a pop phenomenon.

This is a lot for anyone to take on or accept. Here are eight takeaways from The Woman in Me, which hits theaters Tuesday.

She once had the power to burn

Spears became a star with the release of “…Baby, One More Time” when she was 16.

Four years later, she played the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show, which she calls “one of the seemingly endless good things happening to me.”

“I’ve been named the ‘most powerful woman’ on Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful celebrities, and next year I’ll be number one,” Spears wrote. She received offers including a Pepsi commercial and the film Crossroads, although the latter put her off acting as she didn’t like how she lost herself in the character.

“When I think back to that time, I was really living my dream, living my dream. My tours have taken me all over the world,” she says, and she had fun “at 19.” She turned down a role in the film version of Chicago, a decision she appears to regret. And she would like it to be even more fun.

“I had power then; I wish I could use it more thoughtfully,” she says, “and be more rebellious.”

She says she has never had a problem with alcohol. Adderall, however…

“I liked to drink, but it never got out of control,” Spears writes, even telling stories of drinking with her mother when she was 12 and then partying with people like Paris. Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. She was planning a trip to Las Vegas with tour friends in 2003 and says, “I was a little girl who worked so hard, and then suddenly my schedule was empty for a few days, and then: Hello alcohol! It was then – apparently in vain – that she married childhood friend Jason Alexander for a whopping 55 hours.

“Do you want to know what my drug of choice is?” asks Spears. “What did I really do besides drink? Adderall, an amphetamine given to children for ADHD. Yes, Adderall gave me a high, but what I found much more appealing was that it made me feel less depressed for a few hours. It was the only antidepressant that worked for me, and I really felt like I needed one of those.”

Spears says she started taking Prozac in 2000 and was given envelopes of medication while she was in conservatorship, but she never discloses what she is or is not currently taking.

But! She admits to smoking Virginia Slims. Smokes, present time. Don’t tell the children.

Justin Timberlake was a real jerk

JT, whom Spears met when they were both on The Mickey Mouse Club as kids, was her first serious romance and they reunited many years later. He also broke her heart badly while they were living together. She says he cheated on her multiple times; he then broke up with her via text message, went on an infamous PR tour beating her up, and wrote songs that portrayed her as the bad guy in their relationship.

Of course, Britney also cheated on Justin at one point. She kissed choreographer Wade Robson, but that was it, she says.

“As much as Justin hurt me, I had a huge foundation of love, and when he left me, I was devastated,” Spears writes. “When I say devastated, I mean I could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could do was cry. I don’t know if I was in clinical shock, but it seemed that way to me.”

There was also the fact that she was once pregnant with his child—a pregnancy that she terminated after he insisted that they were too young to have a child. “They told me, ‘This might hurt a little,'” she said of her medically induced miscarriage at home. She then describes the spasms and agony she experienced as she lay on the bathroom floor while the medicine did its work. Timberlake, she writes, played guitar for her while she suffered.

Timberlake has since apologized for his behavior, although the abortion story became public this week. But it cemented for Spears the idea that the world is run by and for men, with women ultimately taking responsibility for their misdeeds.

Guys, she could handle it on her own.

And then there was the conservatorship, which came after her controversial divorce from Kevin Federline and the loss of custody of their children. “If they had allowed me to live my life, I know I would have followed my heart, come out of this situation the right way and made it through,” Spears writes. “Thirteen years passed and I felt like a shadow of myself. Now I remember how my father and his accomplices controlled my body and my money for so long, and it makes me feel bad.”

She compares herself to male music artists who suffered from substance abuse or lost all their money but never lost their freedom. “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me,” she concludes.

By saying no, she was held against her will and drugged.

Spears details the months she spent in a “luxury” rehab facility in Beverly Hills after her father reported over-the-counter “energy supplements” were found in her purse. This came just after she refused to perform a dance move she deemed too dangerous for her second Las Vegas residency – an engagement that was eventually called off.

“My father said that if I don’t go, I will have to go to court and it will be awkward for me. He said, “We’ll make you look like an idiot, and believe me, you won’t win.” I’d rather tell you to go than the judge in court tell you.”

“I felt like it was a form of blackmail and I was gassed,” she writes. “Honestly, I felt like they were trying to kill me.”

At the rehab center, she was abruptly taken off Prozac and put on lithium—a powerful drug her grandmother Jean had taken—and forced to undergo extensive therapy. She spent two months alone and then a month in a building with other patients.

“Three months into my incarceration, I began to believe that my little heart, no matter what Britney did to me, was no longer inside my body.”

And then there is dad.

It looks like Spears is done with her family these days, especially her father Jamie. Mama Lynn, brother Brian, and sister Jamie Lynn are the objects of scorn (mixed with a few brief moments of appreciation), but dear old dad gets nothing but rage.

She blames Jamie’s alcoholism for “making us so poor” during her childhood, portraying a man who says he regularly drank himself into oblivion. Jamie made millions from her by keeping her under his tight control during his 13-year conservatorship, she claims. And she says he honored her throughout, from her earliest years to the end of her tutelage.

“You’re a disgrace,” she quotes her father as saying after she lost custody of her children.

And when he became her conservator, he allegedly told her, “I’m Britney Spears now.”

PS: About Sam Asghari

Hasem, as Spears calls her now-estranged husband Sam Asghari, appears to be a touchstone for her in the references woven throughout the nearly 300-page book.

“Now my husband, Hesam, tells me that it’s normal for beautiful girls to shave their heads,” she writes after telling her side of the story about that infamous head-shaving incident and the subsequent umbrella attack on her father’s car. “It’s the atmosphere,” he says, “the choice not to play with ideas of traditional beauty. He’s trying to make me feel better because he’s sorry I’m still hurting.”

After dating for five years, the couple married in June 2022, about six months after she lost custody. But in August, after the book was completed, Asghari filed for divorce from Spears.

And finally…

In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, she addresses her fans: “If you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book would be written in emojis, right?” She ends this comment with a series of single rose emojis – and sincerely thanks her “co-authors”, who obviously know who they are.