Britney Spears finally revealed her side of the battle to end the 13-year conservatorship she was forced into under her father. “The Woman In Me,” released Oct. 24, gained mass popularity and speculation long before officially hitting the shelves. It is no surprise that people are jumping on this opportunity for more information about Spears’s life. She has been subject to the spotlight her entire life, and this glimpse into her life indeed reveals just how drastically she was affected by her rise to fame as a child.
The wait for the memoir has been around two years since, in 2021, Spears was finally freed from the conservatorship with her father that began in 2008. In 2018, however, the abusive nature of this relationship became a pop culture frenzy. “#FreeBritney” was trending everywhere, and dedicated fans even visited a mental facility to protest her unfair treatment. She describes the events leading up to why she was placed under a conservatorship, such as when she infamously shaved her head.
After her quick rise to fame, she found herself in over-dramatized paparazzi articles, unhealthy relationships and dependent on energy stimulants to keep up with her rigorous performance schedule. After some public scandals, the threat of losing her children forced her to give in to her father. Spears stated in her memoir, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”
It goes into in-depth detail about some of the most iconic periods of her life. Everything from the public breakup with Justin Timberlake to how she felt abandoned by her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears. However, the media’s reception of the tell-all book is all over the board.
Some outlets took the book and analytically covered all the main points laid out by Spears. The New York Times, for instance, went through bullet point by bullet point, framing the main arguments in the broader context of the pop star’s career.
By the looks of their headlines, other sites used the release of Spears’s book to attract the most clicks on their site. Headlines advertising that Britney knew Timberlake was cheating on her or dramatizing her drug use are mixed among the press surrounding the memoir. These articles do not focus on the time of her life Spears described as being “ritualistically tortured” with any sort of grace. Instead, she bore the last decade of what she endured, and they turned around and perpetuated the same media behavior that landed Spears in this position in the first place.
Spears’s memoir was necessary for her to write to gain closure for everything she faced, from being forced into mental hospitals to constant body shaming from her father and peers. She outlined the hostile environment she grew up in and how the spotlight became inescapable once she was a part of it.
Ever since the #FreeBritney trend made its way onto social media, there was an air of mystery surrounding Spears’s life. This made it easy to become a common joke on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where the star is still subject to constant scrutiny from dancing videos. While the issue of her current social media presence is unanswered, the resolution to fans’ questions about her conservatorship and circumstances finally arrived.
More so, Spears is finally free of her father and overbearing managers to expose them for how they manipulated her status for their own gain. After receiving negative criticism, she wrote in an Instagram post, “It has given me closure on everything for a better future!”
Many are disappointed the memoir did not have as much of a feminist mentality behind the writing. The overall expectation was a piece that would leave you with a “stick-it-to-the-man” message that cursed the many people who took advantage of her year after year.
Yet, “The Woman In Me” is exactly what Britney Spears wanted to write after years of being trapped by her own family. It exposes the abusive industry she grew up in but focuses on her thoughts and feelings surrounding the last decade of her life. One can only hope the media can take a hint from her book and see how detrimental their harmful exposure of her was in a difficult period of her life. A quote from BookMark sums it up all too well: “Ultimately, what is clear is that Britney Spears is a woman recovering from trauma. And we ought to give her the space to do so.”
