Let me just state my takeaways, from someone who grew up with her music and liked it but was never a fan. SPOILERS below
I believe she has a horrible family, I don’t think they care for her at all, I think they stole her money and used her every chance they got. I’m amazed she’s standing at all.
But.. based on the book, I get the feeling that Britneys not the most reliable narrator. Not that she’s lying, more like she’s a brilliant artist who lacks other skills. The story about her receipts and that one phone call to her mom, and how her early boyfriend’s used her. It makes me feel like she’s not all there. And we don’t get any information on how her boyfriend’s viewed the conservatorship, which bothers me so much..
What are your thoughts?
by Worried-1
29 Comments
badly written, interesting story. also i don t think Britney understood she was affected by her childhood and how that oushed her to do certain things. she just knew she wanted attention but didn t try to cure it and didn t saw how others took advantage of her. maybe she realised it but I don t see that in book
The book presented generational trauma to me in a way that was eye opening. She’s uneducated (and so is her family) and I think we (fans, public, etc) expect too much from her. It makes me really sad for her.
I wasn’t entirely engaged with the first third, but the rest I found very interesting, in terms of how one of the most well known women in the world could be held captive in open sight.
While I can only imagine how much she must have wanted to finally have her own words out there, I wonder if she could have benefitted from a bit more space between the end of the conservatorship and writing the book. What pressure was she under to get that churned out? It doesn’t seem like much time to even begin to process what happened, never mind putting it down for the scrutiny of the world
When I was growing up, Britney was my superhero, she seemed to have it all: talent, fame, money, she dated famous singers and actors.
It was fascinating to look behind the curtain. I still love her and I wish we as a society had treated her differently when she needed help, but we treated her like a circus animal.
I follow her on IG a nd vert often i look at her posts and thing: jesus cheist Brit are u ok? but then u know what? she is a free person and millions of other ppl do idiotic thigns and show them on tik tok so why cant she? especially give what she has gone thru, really tough.
I loved the book. I am very glad Justin timberturd is getting cancelled, I have hated him for years, what an asswipe
She’s a mentally unstable narrator. Not reliable in the slightest.
She hasn’t been well for some time. It’s really disturbing to watch her videos on insta, she’s clearly not well.
My POV is that even if she isn’t reliable, there is still a tension between her being both so incompetent she needs a conservatorship AND continuing to perform at the level she was.
I agree, her family is awful and it kind of seems like Britney never matured past age 14 when she left school. The way she describes and perceives things just comes across as simple and naive, like how a child would understand events. It also seemed like she was a passenger in her own life and just floated from one thing to the next without really understanding what was going on.
Did she use a ghostwriter? The writing was basic but okay, although the three-page chapters were an unusual choice.
The book was fascinating. I actually read it at the same time I read “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” and it was interesting how both Britney and Jeanette were abused by their parents, manipulated by their employers, and how multiple adults could have stepped in and didn’t.
However, I definitely think Britney’s limited education came through in the book, and she also seems to have mental issues exacerbated (but not necessarily caused) by the abuse she suffered at her family’s hands. The story about her driving a car on a cliff with her boyfriend, escaping the paparazzo by executing a turn that could have killed them and having her justify it as “we should be able to make mistakes, even risky ones” makes me think she’s not mentally all there.
You certainly can’t compare trauma and Jeanette suffered physical (and probably sexual) abuse rather than financial but Jeanette seemed like a much more reasonable person.
I am definitely NOT advocating for the type of oversight her dad forced on Britney (in addition to forcing her to perform) but she needed a psychiatrist before she even became a child star.
I think parts of her story might be skewed to her perspective, like I genuinely don’t understand what went down with Kevin Federline, and I think she is a victim of trauma and she talks like one. I don’t think she’s unreliable as much as she is putting things out there that she needs people to know. It is alarming how much she was caught in a web of family patterns repeating themselves. She had no way of protecting herself, despite her resources and her success, because she had no understanding of the underlying issues in her family or the world at large.
I prefer “The man inside me” by Tobias Funke
I listened to it as an audio book. I don’t think the way it was written would well, if at all, if you were reading it.
I felt really bad for Britney. Almost everyone in her life used her. She also struck me as being really angry still (not that she doesn’t have every right to be). I hope she finds healing.
I enjoyed the book. The way I see it is that she probably didn’t write the book and she probably thinks everything in the book is true.
It was a wild ride and I couldn’t relate to a lot of it but it was a quick read. It’s hard to think the same person who danced on insta in a bikini wielding a knife would be the same person to write a book, let alone that book.
I agree with others. I was expecting something amazing, like I’m Glad My Mom Died level. I hoped she would have had the perfect ghost writer to get her story out there in as much detail as possible. I did really enjoy it and felt like it opened me up to more of the story than I knew, but it did read as if she had not fully processed everything before putting the story out there. her mental health problems are still apparent.
also, it kind of made me realize her music was never that good. i listened to tracks that weren’t singles for the first time and couldn’t figure out why she maintained popularity for so long. Even her recent stuff sounds robotic and dated. Maybe it’s just not for me. I just don’t get how she had so many fans when she has maybe 5 really stellar tracks.
I always have seen her as a perfect woman, someone I like to be when I grow up. Now that is based on what was shown to us.
Seeing the behind curtain scene makes me a little stress out. So much struggle and barely anyone helps her. I don’t listen to much of her music but she is really awesome. Never I have heard her talking much about her past life. God knows how much more she must have suffered but never shared with anyone!
I’ll preface this with saying I wasn’t really ever a fan of her music & I don’t think she is a very good singer. But damn, she was gifted at entertaining and I do think she deserves the success and reputation she built on that. She paved the way for so many solo female artists.
I would recommend the audiobook. It’s narrated by Michelle Williams and she’s SO good at it. Her JT impression made me legit lol.
I agree about the points on the book being very simple. Simple language, simple thoughts, simple sentences. It was like listening to the perspective of a teenager. Product of parents who saw education as a barrier to putting her to work and making money. They didn’t let her experience childhood and boy has it taken its toll.
I felt terribly sad for her by the end. Especially knowing she is now going through yet another divorce and yet another person in her life is leaving. She seems like she honestly has no one real in her life and how incredibly lonely that must be, even more so for someone suffering from major mental health issues. Literally no one had/has her back.
Her family was terrible. Used her as a tool to make money and then worked her like a dog until she had nothing left to give. Clearly the conservatorship was never about helping her but more about keeping the money rolling in and having complete control of it. It’s sickening what she went through. Not even going to get into the trauma surrounding her kids and probably major untreated post partum.
As for the credibility of it all… it was her book about her perspective. Everyone has different perceptions of events and she is free and entitled to her own. I think any autobiography should be taken with a grain of salt just for that reason.
So ya, as weird as her instagram is and all her unintelligible rants are, at least she’s free to do it all. I hope for her sake she can find some happiness and stability in her life eventually. And I hope this book helped her heal a little bit and allowed her to tell *her* truth in a way that was cathartic for her.
So, to preface, I haven’t finished it yet. Had to put it down to focus on a book club book. However, I’ve been thinking about it constantly in the meantime.
I agree with the other takes that she’s very uneducated. She came from a poor uneducated family and they were so keen on her giving them money that they didn’t push for her to get educated either. I remember when celebrity news sites were low-key making fun of her because she had hired a tutor so she could help her sons with their homework in elementary school. (Looking back, the media has always been so incredibly unkind to her, even when she was actively trying to better herself so she could help her sons.) I also think I remember it being mentioned that she was okay with the conservatorship, she just didn’t want any of her family being her conservator. Which…. *waves hands at how they abused their conservatorship* Britney was right to worry. Also, everyone has been speculating that she had a ghost writer. Yeah, she did, she had help from several different people writing it.
But I also haven’t seen people mention a point I’ve been thinking about a lot as the anniversary of her conservatorship ending passed two weeks ago, which is this: I don’t think she was actually ready to put forth a memoir. She was twenty-seven when she was put under conservatorship and was kept in it for thirteen years; for over half of her adult life, she was under someone else’s control. It only ended *two years ago.* She has over a decade’s worth of trauma to work through, not to mention all the shit that happened beforehand. If people think there’s not a lot of emotional substance, I think it’s because she simply doesn’t have the emotions yet.
It will take time for her to truly come to terms with everything that happened to her, and I think that’s at least part of the reason she put the book out–*everyone* was clamoring to get her take on what happened to her as if she magically knew how to handle herself as a forty-year-old woman when the last time she made a decision she wasn’t even thirty. People were calling wellness checks on her as recently as September of *this year* (because of that weird video where she was dancing with knives, which had me raising my eyebrow in confusion but didn’t set off any ‘Danger, Will Robinson!’ vibes). I think she put the book out as a way to say ‘*this* is why I’m like this, *this* is what I’m contending with, I’m trying to figure out shit that I should have been able to learn years ago, and if you can’t be patient with me as I learn at least go away.’
I think she was so horribly treated by her family, who profited off her captivity without caring about her, and by certain corners of the press and the public, who kicked her when she was vulnerable. My personal view is that it’s okay with me that even with ghost writers, it’s not the most well-written narrative—I recall especially when she said she felt God in the desert that I really wish she had given more context about how that feeling came about, and I felt that way at multiple other points as well. But she’s a genius performer and pop music icon, and I’m okay with her not being the best storyteller besides. I guess I tend to not expect celebrities who are known for other things—their athleticism, their acting, etc.—to also be powerfully articulate or always the most insightful, but I’m pleasantly delighted when they are. I learned a lot from her book nevertheless, and I’m grateful it’s out there!
I enjoyed (well enjoyed is the wrong word because it was hard) hearing her side of the story…to everything, the good and bad.
I liked her music growing up, and although I didn’t pay a ton of attention when she started ending up in tabloids, I just assumed she’d gone crazy and that was why she married her childhood friend, gotten her kids taken away, etc.
I loved hearing about how she became famous and how Hit Me Baby One More Time was made.
That being said, I guess I did sometimes wonder if there wasn’t another side to some of the stories she was telling. Sometimes it seemed a bit one sided in that she was always the victim of all these awful, manipulative people in her life – family, and exes. There didn’t seem to be too many good friends and I felt really bad for her.
I felt truly pained to hear about the stuff she went though, and glad that she wrote a book. Was it a fun read? Not most of the time. But am I glad I read it, yes
I felt sad reading it. It feels like a friend you fell out of touch with is filling you in on all of the terrible shit she’s been through since you talked to her last.
I don’t know her personally, but as long as you’re both comfortable and having a good time, then I’m happy for you.
I was a fan of her from her 1st single and 1st album. I have bought her cds and gone to her concerts and worn the t shirts. Everyone “turned” on her when she had her mental breakdown but I could have practically been chris crocker screaming “leave Britney alone.”
So. Given my admiration of her, I’ve always known she wasn’t a very intelligent, deep thinking person. That paired with mental illness…. she was the perfect victim to be exploited, manipulated, and controlled. For years she’s given interviews saying she just wanted to be a mom and raise her boys. If you’ve followed her public story with the slightest amount of discernment it was so clear she was being abused.
So I don’t think she wrote the book as some literary masterpiece. I think she wanted her story out there, and I think she deserved to have it told. She’s a very unpolished and uneducated person surrounded by people who needed to keep her that way to control her. But she’s very human: flawed, silly, traumatized, and her memories are likely inconsistent. She’s strong but emotionally immature. She’s had to be to survive.
I felt like I already knew most of the information she shared. Wasn’t very interesting for me.
I agree she’s not the most reliable narrator. But I also think it’s important to let her tell her story, and I am sick of people talking about Britney’s life without her input and just to profit. She has clearly suffered a lot, and has been taken advantage of. As a reader, I feel her pain.
In terms of verisimilitude I, overall, believe her because facts are there. However I also know the truth is told trough her filter and she has been suffering for a long time so maybe some things or facts are distorted.
*Woman in me,* presented generational and domestic trauma. One thing that struck out to me tho is how Britney describes things and events through as if she views and understand things the same way she did when she rose to stardom, Naïve and simple.
her family was awful for how they made Britney sit as a passenger while they took charge of her career and forgot to raise Britney
I felt the same as you. Desperately sorry for a woman who’s clearly been taken advantage of, but it felt there was a lot between the lines that Britney can’t recognise in herself.
She repeats a lot “how could I be unwell if I was still doing XYZ?” Quite easily, and it’s a sincere shame that you had no one around you who was interested in doing anything about that.
i get the feeling that she became that way, not that she was always that way. she is obviously not as lucid now as she seemed in the past. the parts of the book where she describes forced stints in rehab and mental health clinics, and being forced to take lithium, those were particularly shocking. she is severely traumatized and if all accounts in the book are accurate i would not be surprised if she’s suffered irreparable damage/will never be the same person again. it’s really sad
I agree with re the simplistic style of writing etc. It was initially a bit disappointing but I think it is true to Britney and her ‘voice’ at this stage. The saddest part for me is that Britney didn’t have anyone in her corner encouraging her to stand up for herself or make her voice be heard or protect her from danger which led her to be unable to spot it herself.
The older guy taking advantage of her when she was 14, Justin Timberlake cheating throughout their relationship, then using her to help him rebrand, Kevin Federline using her to jumpstart his career then when that failed taking the kids away. I think a lot of her health troubles stemmed from her being depressed and over worked and her family capitalised on that to lock her up. It sounded like Justin’s family were the only people who seemed to care about her and when they broke up she lost them and had nobody.
I don’t doubt Britney had difficulties, I think she’s probably quite immature for her age due to her career taking off when she’s young but she needed someone in her corner to guide her. I hope she’s in control of her own destiny now and is doing so much better.
Also side note I felt so bad for her British grandmother who left London to go to a small American town and was never allowed back to visit her family. Made me so grateful to be a woman in this century because that must have been awful!
I’m horrified after reading it and seeing her “arguments” with her teenage sons (NOTHING abusive and fairly normal) were recorded by her sons and then posted by her ex husband. No wonder she feels alone and paranoid when even her sons are recording private moments. I can’t image knowing that there’s a possibility anything I say or do will be released to the media. I think she might be a little out of it but I fully understand how someone could begin lose it after everything she has and continues to go through.