Opinions of a Wolf

Two years after her conservatorship ended, pop star Britney Spears tells her story.

Summary:
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.

Review:
I think it’s important you know what sort of perspective you’re getting in my review. So let me be clear: I am a Britney Spears fan. From the moment I heard the first four notes of …Baby One More Time’s mp3 playing through the tinny speakers on my family’s pc when I was 13 years old, I was enamored – and I hadn’t even seen the music video yet! (And I didn’t for a while.) When I did finally start seeing Britney and not just hearing her, it got even better. Her fashion sense was, to me, spot on. I wanted nothing more than to wear those jeans and bare my midriff like her. (Although, I did not have the body confidence to do so.) Her eyeliner, her music videos, her sound.

Britney’s music was a perpetual backdrop to my rough teens and twenties. I laughed when Oops! I Did It Again mentioned the necklace in The Titanic. I got teary-eyed singing Lucky in my bedroom. I played I’m a Slave 4 U both because I liked it and because it drove my mother insane. I was terrified of snakes, and Britney DANCED with one while performing. I was a closeted bisexual, and when she kissed Madonna, I lost my mind. When she had kids, I was in college. I didn’t understand why she was so excited to be a mom, but I loved that she knew what she wanted so much. Blackout dropped my senior year, and I belted out Piece of Me on study breaks. I listened to Womanizer to make myself feel better when I was lonely in grad school Circus is still on my #GirlBoss playlist I listen to to help hype myself up when I’m doing something that feels scary in my various careers. (I’m on my second.)

When her conservatorship started, I didn’t understand what it meant. I thought she had trouble with her finances, and someone was helping her out. My husband took me to see her at her Vegas residency. I was so excited I threw up in our hotel room right before the show. I feel badly now knowing what she was going through (I did not know then), but I am here to tell you she still put on a phenomenal show for us fans in spite of all that.

When the #FreeBritney movement really started to take off, and I came to understand what a conservatorship actually meant, I joined in calling for her to be freed. I explained to anyone who would listen what was wrong with a conservatorship. And I believe this for anyone, not just for Britney. No one deserves to have their adult agency taken away, regardless of their mental abilities and/or mental health. Anything else is just ableist.

Anyway, that is who is reviewing this memoir for you. A fan who loves Britney for who she is.

The ghostwriters did a very good job of leaving Britney’s voice clearly in-tact throughout the book. It sounds like her. The story is told mostly chronologically from her childhood forward, although there is sometimes some jumping back and forth in some places. If you have read Britney’s Instagram captions, then you have some idea of the general tone of the book. But it has been edited so it is clearer than those. (And with less run-on sentences, and no emojis except in the Afterword.)

What stood out to me the most about the book was these things. First, Britney expresses that being put in the conservatorship caused her to regress sometimes. Essentially, treating her like a child made her act like a child. This is excellent insight, and a reason to not inflict conservatorships on people of any ability level. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and like an adult. (I’d argue children deserve to be treated with more agency than they are, but that’s another topic for another blog post.) Second, Britney is of the opinion that what happened to her would never happen to a male pop star. How she was infantilized and not allowed space to be weird and creative was largely because she was a woman. Third, Britney feels part of why what happened to her did was because she tries so hard to be a “nice girl” that people end up walking all over her. She talks a bit about Madonna and how, “she demanded power, and so she got power.” (page 101) But that’s not part of Britney’s nature.

Fourth, Justin Timberlake broke up with her via text message then used the break-up to make her into the bad guy and spur on his solo career. Reminder to those who maybe weren’t around at that time – cell phones at that time didn’t let you write long messages. A break-up in a text message would have been necessarily character-limited. It makes it even worse. It seems that Britney was well and truly heart-broken and betrayed and society really piled on her on top of it. I didn’t realize that the paparazzi laws have changed since the early 2000s. I obviously wasn’t a celebrity but I remember how it was. You could see the paparazzi swarming celebrities constantly even in their own photos and videos. I used to wonder how they could stand it. (The answer is: a lot of them couldn’t.) The media was also incredibly cruel. I still have the internalized messages from just being a young woman at that time – and I wasn’t their target.

The magazines seemed to love nothing more than a photo they could run with the headline “Britney Spears got HUGE! Look, she’s not wearing makeup!” As if those two things were some kind of a sin–as if gaining weight was something unkind I’d done to them personally, a betrayal.”

The book makes it abundantly clear that the instigators of the conservatorship were her family. They swept in, claiming to be worried about her but actually wanting to control her. At the beginning of the book, she talks about her family history. How her father’s dad was abusive to him. This same grandfather also locked away her grandmother as “crazy” and left to rot there. The same thing her father tried to do to her. The intergenerational trauma gave me chills.

Ok, so why four stars instead of five? There were a few places where I wanted more. Not about any of her traumas. She has every right to only tell as much as she wants to tell. But some of the business stuff. I wanted to know more. I loved how she told us about what it was like to shoot her first music video and to dance with the snake at the awards show. I wanted more of that. What was it like to kiss Madonna? Why did she? (She says it was her idea, that they didn’t rehearse that way, but not much else.) I wish the ghost writers had nudged her a bit more to put more of those types of anecdotes in the book. Or when they came up to say more. (She says she threw a party with Natalie Portman but essentially nothing about what the party was like.) I wanted to know more about this part of Britney. Her successes, not just her traumas.

A question I was asked when I was seen reading the book was if I think Britney is really mentally unwell. My answer is this: this is a book written by a traumatized person. Britney was traumatized by her family, by the media, by various romantic partners, by the conservatorship. I don’t want to diagnose anyone. But I will say that trauma often leads to C-PTSD. And C-PTSD can often be misdiagnosed as other mental health conditions. So I hope people will keep these things in mind when looking at Britney and give her some grace. I do also think Britney is a simple, trusting person. Those type of people often end up being taken advantage of.

I’m assuming most fans have either already read the book or are (im)patiently waiting for their copy. If you’re on the fence, to you I say, this book is worth the read to explore intergenerational trauma and to dive down into late 90s/early 2000s culture. To be reminded (or learn) how misogynistic it was, even to women who were succeeding by its own rules.

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4 out of 5 stars

Length: 288 pages – average but on the shorter side

Source: Library

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