Am I the only person worried about Ms. Britney Spears? Her memoir, The Woman in Me, is out and it’s downright delightful, as juicy as a ripe pear (pun intended), tracing the star’s stellar success, excruciatingly public meltdown, and current regrouping. The magic of Britney’s book of revelation is its conversational tone—we accompany her as she flips through a scrapbook of her life and gives us the choicest anecdotes, striking nostalgically at our collective histories while swirling in some personal exposé. The Timberlake years. The Timberlake pregnancy. The 55-hour Vegas marriage. The K-Fed. A reminder that “so pimp” was once a genuine compliment. The Pepsi vid, the albino python; the “…Baby One More Time,” the “Slave 4 U,” the too high, can’t come down. The paparazzi, the public crying, the head shaving, the umbrella. And then the white noise of her conservatorship and eventual estrangement from her family.
It’s incredible how relatable the story of a Mouseketeers making it in the big city and becoming one of the world’s biggest living pop stars is for us. Readers across the globe nodded in unison when she said, “To be clear: He and I were not in love. I was just honestly very drunk—and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored.” Touché! There’s something equally relatable about the codification of Britney’s chastity; the double-faced idea that you could sell as much barely legal sex as you wanted—scantily clad, gyrating on stage, snogging Madonna—so long as you weren’t actually having it. Culture gobbled up Britney’s innocence while forcing her to parrot a proxy of it.
But now we’ve freed her—the only morally right reaction to the conservatorship of a grown woman. Outside the pages of her book, present-day Britney has the same passion for performance, stripped away from the matrix of pop pageantry we’ve become accustomed to. But Britney unplugged is nothing like MTV Unplugged, as we see her twirl through her mansion—occasionally with knives—for an audience of pampered pooches. She’s rarely seen outside the walls of her compound, and self-shot footage doesn’t suggest a life of easy-going nourishment, a woman completely at ease with herself—it’s important to remember that none of us have evidence of Britney’s actual, day-to-day wellbeing—so much as a child star who doesn’t know how to exist comfortably without any spectators. I’m worried about Britney, but I don’t think she’s a danger to herself; there’s just an electricity to her output that stops any of us looking away. Are we moving from an entertained audience to a rubbernecking one?
In her memoir’s recollections, Britney doesn’t have a manifesto, a thesis that zooms out from this is what happened at the time. We’re getting a report back from the annals of pop history, but I’m not sure Britney is processing how much of her life was reduced to a product for consumption. At this point, we’re used to pop stars being poised and put-together, but Britney’s continually refused to give us that palatable package of singer and dancer; she’s always had a deeply human offstage existence that wouldn’t be silenced. I wonder now, after everything she’s been through, what the price of her freedom is.
The book, chock-full of truths, must feel like a step toward understanding and retribution. Britney being able to tell her own story is novel; her voice was always overprotected. And not to sound too American Idol, but Britney’s on a journey, emerging from the myriad restraints of her youth into a newfound and unfamiliar freedom. She’s finding her feet after years of familial government. I keep thinking about a lyric from the memoir’s titular song: All I need is time that’s mine while I’m in between. I guess Britney’s freedom isn’t about being finished or polished, it’s about having the right to make her own choices while she sits between captivity and emancipation and figures out what comes next.