Britney Spears’ The Woman In Me Review: Her memoir says parents and family can be toxic

Britney Spears is a popstar that transcended music and showbiz to become a pop culture icon in the Nineties. Her memoir, The Woman In Me, is one of the most awaited books of this year and it doesn’t disappoint. If anything, it compels one to think ahead.  Spears has broken free of a legal conservatorship under her father and a lawyer to bring a horrifying tale of life under such inhuman control. From constant body shaming from her family, to being used as a cash cow and an income source for more than a decade, her story is one of emotional abuse, mental health abuse and constant suffering under an all-consuming media gaze. Besides the horror of a lifetime of abnormal incidents, the biggest takeaway from Spears’ autobiography is the undeniable opportunism that comes with kids being forced to join showbiz.

Spears became an instant music icon when her debut single Hit Me Baby One More Time in 1998 when she was just 16. Immediately, the money came pouring in. As a child she had grown up in an insecure and unhappy home. Her father, whom she describes a short tempered alcoholic almost always rowing with her mother, scared her. She found a sense of being alive while performing music. But this music came back to suffocate her after the success of her single. Suddenly Spears was touted to be a ‘virgin’, someone who was not easy to get nor easy to forget. Besides this absurd sexuality driven tag, all her choices and time were controlled by her parents. She couldn’t go out with friends, or party, or even eat freely. Her body had to adhere to very difficult standards, meaning she was monitored. As adulthood came along this dysfunctional dynamic, Spears went on to live by abnormal standards for relationships. Justin Timberlake and she dated, lived together and still the virgin tag persisted. She had to abort a baby at home, a horrific experience without pain medication, because Timberlake and her coterie wouldn’t risk getting photographed at a hospital. When they broke up, the judgement came her way entirely.

And then came the break-up, which triggered a huge media frenzy of judgement and scrutiny. She calls her 2004 tour at the Onyx Hotel “absolutely horrible”, given that she overly sexualised herself at this event. She had two kids with Kevin Federline, another tumultuous relationship, and the aftermath of breaking up with her brought chaos to her life. What followed gradually led up to the horrors of the conservatorship. While leaving the painful details for readers to delve into, suffice it to say she was surveilled, forcibly given strong medication, forbidden to have children with her boyfriend Sam Esmail. All men she dated had to sign an NDA and give out personal details for a screening. Spears put up with most of this because it gave her access to her kids. Only when she opposed a certain dance move, her opposition triggered her father Jamie Spears enough to push her into a solitary rehab facility. Here, Spears was drugged by a nurse who came along with a security guard, because she was considered a ‘threat’. She suffered for months, without seeing her kids, when a nurse let it slip first that a silent but solid fans based movement was building up against the conservatorship. Eventually, she filed for legal help and in 2021, the conservatorship came to an end.

This memoir makes for a poignant read. Spears has never had a normal life or personal freedom. The limits on her freedom are nothing short of tragic. Her father would call her ‘fat’, body shaming her to put herself through difficult gym routines that affected her self-esteem. She has been stuck in a time warp of sorts, where being the young music sensation has been her identity decades since her debut.  Her music has not always been her focus for the ‘ritual torture’ that her father heaped on her has affected her behaviour and state of mind.

The fact that now she can eat a piece of chocolate, or she can choose to wear what she likes, or she can hang out with friends, indicates just how suffocating her conservatorship had been. The insanity of living under the media glare nearly broke her spirit. When she had her first son, she thought she could shield him by telling the media to back off. She writes, “I wanted everyone to stay away: stand back! There’s a baby here!”. Yet the paparazzi became more aggressive and pushy when she had her sons in quick succession. She explains, “ I got a little depressed once I was no longer keeping them safe inside my body… I wanted them back inside me so the world couldn’t get at them.”

Paying the price of instant stardom has taken years off her ability to live her life normally. It has also diminished her chances of growing as a professional or a performer. Spears seems to be just relieved to be set free. But her suffering is inherently linked to the fact that she became a source of income for her parents. It is not uncommon for parents of celebrity kids to milk their children for money. But it remains unacceptable and unhealthy and needs immediate legal and practical recourse. Spears story, more dramatic, reads like that of Demi Moore, whose Guynes Moore, had depended on her for income and then squandered a lot of her money on incomplete rehab stays. Stories like these proliferate in Hollywood as the media is more aggressive there. But it is also not unheard of in Indian showbiz, as television child stars have faced undue long work hours and bullying from their parents. A few interventions are made, by producers or by court orders. Still this practice persists in real life, because making a child work while one is unsuccessful is a viable and easier way out.

Spears highlights through the book that a lot of this suffering that she faced has come her way because she is a woman. Some of this is true for women who have to live up to exacting standards. Men aren’t subjected to these by popular media or public opinion.  If one had ensured that Spears gets to complete her education and gets to interact with peers of her age, rather than lock her down in a profit oriented conservatorship for her supposed ‘erratic’ behaviour, perhaps her life would have turned out differently. Sometimes parents don’t have their children’s best interests in mind. Britney Spears has had the misfortune to live through  this uncomfortable truth.

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