October 27, 2023 • 46 mins
The princess of pop's much anticipated memoir, “The Woman In Me,” is finally out. This week, Jess and Susie speed-read it and share their thoughts on the woman whose life is perhaps the ultimate case of "in retrospect."
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
I almost wish it had just been written like her
chaotic captions on Instagra.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, I know, I was thinking that a bit too.
I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie Beannacher and this is
in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment
from the past that shaped us.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
This week we have a special episode. The long awaited
memoir from Britney Spears has finally hit stands, and Susie
and I have stayed up all night reading it and
we're here to talk about it. It's Britney Bitch. Okay,
give me your first impressions. I know you were up
for a while last night reading delving into this memoir.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Well, my first impressions are a lot of the book
has been covered in the last week or so, so
a lot of the sort of big surprises have already
been revealed.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It was sort of interesting to read it.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
For yourself, though, because I felt like in some ways
it answers some questions. Yeah, but there are still so
many questions unanswered, Like I have so many questions that
we can talk about as we go through some of
the topic.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Areas in a weird way. It feels a little thin.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I hate to say that, because getting to hear from
Brittany herself after so long, and after she felt like
her voice had been essentially extinguished for so.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Long, is you know, valuable. But in a weird way,
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I've learned more about her from following her Instagram than
I did in this book, because in some ways it
feels very sanitized. It feels very much like it's been
polished for a mainstream audience. Yeah, and then they just like,
you know, dropped in some you know, sealacious revelations because
they knew that's what would sell the book, which isn't
(01:57):
entirely fair to Brittany because she has a ghostwriter. So
there's a lot going on here that goes into a book,
right that you know isn't just from the author.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
What were your first impressions?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, I mean, we know so much about Britney Spears,
like for better or worse. I think a lot of
us who have followed her case and the conservatorship and
read the articles about it and were fans back in
the day, we just know a lot. And so to
read a book you're kind of expecting to get things
that you didn't already know, and in fact, she does,
I think, confirm a lot of things that were suspected.
(02:31):
But like you said, it feels thin and parts. It's
pretty vague in some of the areas where I really
wanted details, And I found myself, like a couple of
hours in just frantically googling who the ghostwriter was because
I wanted more information about that person.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What did you find? I'm actually curious.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
He's a journalist. There's not much there. I don't know.
I don't know it would be fascinating to hear from him,
because there were just lines in it where I was like,
that just doesn't sound like her, and who I'm to
say what sounds like Britney spears? But as you said,
we know so much about how she is today from
her Instagram, or at least we think we know that.
(03:09):
We kind of have this idea in our minds of
what her voice sounds like, and it's not quite as
polished as I think the book is.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, it's interesting she chose a man as the ghostwriter.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I don't think I realized that because I think the
name is like Sam something, It's like a generic name
that could be either way, and I assumed.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was a woman just because interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So much of the book is about this tension in
her life of is she a child, you know, sort
of the line from her song not a girl, not
yet a woman, This kind of tension of was she
allowed to grow up?
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Did she grow up too fast? Has she not grown
up at all? So it feels like a woman might
have handled it better. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I mean, there are definitely lines where you're like, Brittany
definitely didn't say this, and then there are lines where
it clearly is something that Brittany said, like that he's
trying to infuse her voice in it.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Well, did you notice that I swear to God. There's
a lot of I swear to God. I swear to God, Yeah,
which I thought was cute.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And then there was like some repetitiveness that you felt
had to have come from her, right, because why would
he just be like repeating things if they weren't from
her perspective. I almost wish, I mean, this is one
of those wishes that would never come true, but I
almost wish it had just been written like her chaotic
captions on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I know, I was thinking that a bit too. Well.
It's interesting because one of the last big celebrity memoirs
that we read, I think, was Pamela Anderson's, and she
wrote that book herself, and it was really chaotic at times,
like there were these huge swaths of her poetry that
would just come in the middle of chapters. That was
a little strange, but it really felt like her and
(04:42):
I was sort of like, oh, I wish we were
getting some long rambling for any captions. Yeah, in the
middle of this, Like I.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Almost feel like they could have just woven that in
or something, because we do know that's her voice. We
know her voice now, you know. The one other thing
I want to say, because you mentioned like for those
of us who followed her, like we sort of know
so much about her, and that's true. I mean I
obviously followed Brittany. I was a huge fan. I am
a huge fan. I don't know if you know this
about me, but one of my greatest accomplishments of all
(05:08):
time is that Britney Spears follows me on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That's actually amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
It's like less meaningful now that none of us are
on Twitter. But I think the reason she follows me.
I never figured out when she started following me. I
just noticed one day she was and was like, this
is it. I can retire now. I think it's because
when she did her speech to the court about her conservatorship,
I had a tweet that went viral about how lucid
(05:36):
she sounded and how much you can just tell that
she actually was perfectly capable of managing herself. And I
have to assume that's why she started following me. But anyway,
what occurred to me when I was reading all this
last night is that it's easy to forget because she's
come to represent so many things beyond what she's accomplished,
(05:57):
just how insanely accomplished.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
She she is. Yeah, I know, it's almost like she
was going through and then this album came out, and
then this album came out, like in these really short
time spans, it almost was if she could have spent
more time discussing it, Like it's just incredible her her production.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, she sold one hundred and fifty
million records worldwide. She's sold seventy million in the US alone,
She's got fifteen Guinness World Records. Like I didn't even
have all it's like, you know, she has Grammys, she
has MPTV work, She's done all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
She could have filled the whole book just.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, with just her accomplishments.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And she is a genius in this arena, like she
in many ways outside of Madonna, has come to be
synonymous with pop music.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So one of the things I feel a little sad
about in the book is how much of the book
is about all this other bullshit and how she doesn't
get to really be like, I am amazing. I mean,
she you definitely see that in her you see her
grasping for that, but she's been made to feel small
for so long that it's almost she just mentions it
(07:07):
the way I mentioned graduating from college, you know what
I mean, She's like and then that Grammy and then yeah,
everything happened, and I'm like, dude, that's crazy.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Right right.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Some things that I didn't know beforehand that I think
the book really hit on. She really starts from the beginning.
It's sort of a narrative arc of her life chronologically,
and she had a lot of trauma in her childhood,
like real, real trauma, like abuse and violence and alcoholism,
(07:40):
and you know, the death of a grandmother and starting
drinking when she was I think at age thirteen with
her mom and so much of the stuff that it's
easy to see how there would be lasting effects of that.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should have said at
the top of this spoiler alert because we are going
to talk about something in the.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Books spoiler alert and spoiler alert.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
So one thing I do want to mention in that regard,
I was really shocked by the story about her dad's mom.
Like the book starts with this anecdote where her father's
mother died by suicide and you know, in this very
dramatic way she had lost a child and she goes
and she I think she shoots herself on the grave,
(08:26):
and so it really does set the tone for like
how traumatic her entire childhood would be, really at the
hands of her father primarily, but also she has a
lot of resentment about her mother and the way that
her mother created an environment that was like very chaotic
and there was a lot of screaming, and so you know,
(08:49):
the first bit of the book is really about how
she escaped into herself, into her music, that that's how
she sort of found some freedom, and then pretty early on.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
She starts performing.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Right very early on. The Other thing that was noteworthy
is that the mother who commits suicide was Gene, which
is her middle nameleness. She was named after her. But yeah,
that really does set the tone at the very beginning
of the book.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yeah, there are like two sort of central tensions in
the book. One is I mean, obviously, the book is
(09:37):
titled The Woman in Me, so this idea of being
a woman is very central to the book. But the
way it's presented is sort of this tension between not
a girl, not yet a woman?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Is she a child? She talks a.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Lot about regressing, like she talks about Benjamin Button a lot,
and how when things are hard or difficult for her
she quotes ages backwards. She has this real sense that
when she is vulnerable, she starts to feel like a child,
and that just as she is becoming a woman, just
as she is finally getting to the point where she
(10:15):
might have been able to take ownership of her own life,
this incident occurs this period of time after her children,
and then her father puts her in this conservatorship and
then she is essentially infantilized for thirteen years. So then
she is just literally not allowed to become a woman.
But at the same time, you know, she has had
(10:36):
the adult responsibility of supporting her entire family since she
was fifteen, right, So it is like this sort of
thing that she keeps returning to, like was I a child?
Was I a ghost child? At one point she says,
or I felt like a ghost child? Am I a woman?
What does it mean to be a woman? It's like
a very central theme of the book. Did that feel
(10:57):
like it landed for you?
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah? I mean, I think that's something that we've talked
about prior to reading any of this, and just our
observations is that there is this sort of sense of
like she didn't get to fully grow up, and there's
some ways about her that feel really frozen in time,
like she is still living in the early two thousands,
and she does still feel much younger than she is,
(11:23):
but like you said, in so many ways, she was
adultified when she was so young. Like she talks about
various interviews in the media, and who is the interview
with the old guy Ed something?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Oh you mean the story with Ed McMahon.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Oh yeah, McMahon, Okay, yes, so Ed McMahon on Star Search.
I can't remember exactly how old she is, but she's
very young. She's not yet a teenager. And she goes
on and they have this banter and he's asking her
if she has a boyfriend. First of all, it's too
young for her to be having a boyfriend, but then
he's like, what about me? Yes, And this is like
a I don't know how old he was. I remember
him having gray hair, but just little things like that
(11:59):
that she touches on. It various points where it's like
she's being treated like an adult but at the same
time totally infantilized as she actually grows older.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, it's like funny because I mean, honestly, I used
to watch Star Starge. I guess we're going back to
the narrative of how much TV I want, you know.
I think he was trying to be like charming. It's
like a banter like do you have any boyfriends? And
she's like boys are gross or boys are mean? Yeah,
She's like, I'm not mean, you know, and he thinks
it's sweet. But another tension in this book, which is
(12:29):
I think the second central attention, is this idea that
she craves attention. She wants to perform she wants to
be on stage, she wants attention, but also when it happens,
it terrifies her, Like she literally goes backstage after that
moment with Ed McMahon and she weeps, and she constantly
(12:49):
talks about wanting the spotlight but then needing to get
away from it. And then it gets worse. The spotlight
keeps getting harsher and harsher, like as time goes on,
it's like the attention gets crueler, it gets more aggressive,
it becomes physically violent with the paparazzi, and so she
is constantly dipping her toe out and then running away,
(13:11):
dipping her toe out and running away. And now she
is again in this situation where she has to kind
of decide like how much is she going to return
to public life, right Like she sort of said after
the conservatorship that she wasn't going to do that, She's
just going to like chill for a bit, But this
(13:31):
book is a return to public life, right, So there
is this feeling that you get that she can't quite
decide what she wants her relationship to be to attention.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, and it was interesting too, I didn't know that
she had social anxiety and So she talks about that
in the book and she names it as such, and
she describes how, you know, yeah, of course she could
go on stage and she could perform for thousands of
people and do it well, but then in small groups
she would have a lot of anxiety and get really
(14:02):
self conscious and be really embarrassed about what she would say.
And that too, is sort of an interesting tension. I mean,
there's a lot of these tensions and sort of juxtapositions
in the way that she is or has come to be,
and I feel like that was another one.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The other thing that's interesting is she mentions that when
she became a judge on Fear Factor many years later, Yeah,
she hated it, like she hated the.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Pressure of it. She didn't like judging other people.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
She which was so surprising. So because do you think
of her as such an amazing performer.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Another way in which this comes out is the way
she describes as Diane Sawyer interview as so horrible for her. Yes,
let's back up for a second, yeah and explain what
that is. So there's the whole Justin section. We'll get
into Justin and all of that. But after her breakup
with justin Timberlake. Her father essentially forces her, her father
and her team force her to do this interview with
(14:53):
Diane Sawyer, who you know was his former boss, my
former boss, and who was literally one of the most
famous women in the world, another one of these sort
of like big name interviewers. And she describes this interview
as really a breaking point for her. She had a
horrible time. She felt like it was so harsh. And
what's so interesting is when you watch it, because of
course I rewatched the whole thing over the weekend, is
(15:16):
she's actually handling herself with enormous poison.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yes, like she is.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Actually totally on it. She seems incredibly smart. She comes
across as in control of the situation she's in, and
yet what she is feeling is all this anxiety, all
this pressure. And so it's interesting that she does have
this ability to mask, right, which I think is very
common of people who come from traumatic childhoods, Right, that
(15:44):
like you kind of have to have a public persona
because otherwise everyone knows all the crazy things in your house.
So you just like put on this mask and you
go out there and you pretend like everything's fine, and
then the minute you're alone again, you can kind of
fall apart. And that's kind of what she describes that inners.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Right, And I mean, I imagine that's such a big
part of being a performer too. You have to put
on a brave face and you have to look good
while doing it, and so you go out there and
you do it, and whatever is festering underneath the surface
stays there until you get backstage, and she does at
many different points throughout the book describe weeping backstage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Actually, did you see that Katie Perry clip that went viral? Oh,
it's like, yeah, it actually went viral recently, but it's
from an old documentary about her where Russell Brand breaks
up with or like he's telling her he's divorcing her,
either over text or he calls her. It's like it's horrible,
and she's literally about to go on stage and she's weeping,
and then she like shakes herself off and she literally
like gets on one of those lifts that's gonna pull
(16:42):
her up on stage and the next thing you know,
she's just like snapped into it and she's like performing.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And that's sort of what I kept picturing when Brittany
was describing that. So the interesting thing about the Dane
Swear interview is like, honestly, I did not I don't know,
you know, if you've watched it recently, I don't think
the questions are so cruel, Like there are definitely some
questions you just wouldn't ask now, you would just acknowledge
that she was, like I think she was twenty or
(17:09):
twenty one at the time, So there are just some
questions like an adult woman wouldn't ask what is essentially
still like a child about her love life or her virginity,
which is you know, crazy. So there are definitely some
things that feel dated. But she is trying to be empathic.
I mean, I just know when Diane is being harsh
(17:30):
and when she is trying to connect to me. It
was very clear that she was trying to connect. So
it's also interesting what a divide there is from what
I think Diane was trying to do and how Brittany
received it. And I think a lot of that has
to do with the fact that she sort of says
I was so raw, I was so vulnerable.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I had just gone through this breakup with Justin and.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I wasn't ready to have it mined and she there's
a part where she cries and you can see she's
so upset that she's crying. She literally says ooh oh, like.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Oh I remember watching this, Yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Oh my goodness, hello ew strong leaning oh And in
that moment you see that she's like, doesn't want to
be mined in this way, and she's trying to protect herself.
But that just by virtue of being here, that's impossible.
And I think that's also something that's changed in culture,
(18:29):
Like now you would just release something on Instagram, you
wouldn't need to do that. Diane Sawyer interview.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I mean, the other thing that is so horrowing to
read about is just how much control her father had
over her life. I Mean, obviously we knew that that's
what the whole conservatorship was about, but even with this interview,
which was before the conservatorship, he shows up with the
whole team and basically demands that she's gonna go on
the show. She has no prep time. You know, she
(18:56):
doesn't want to do it, but he says what.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Well, and she's also she says a lot about how
she's a people pleaser, so she also has a hard
time saying no, even when she doesn't want to do something.
A different sort of star might have said, like no,
get out of my apartment, I'm not doing it, but
that she sort of does have this. I think she
kind of describes this all like a Southern desire to
be a good girl to please. Not to say too much,
(19:21):
but I think it's probably worth actually backing up and
explaining why she's doing this interview, because it's essentially because
Justin Timberlake has broken her heart and is waging a
sort of publicity battle against her. So let's talk about
the Justin parts of the book, because they are a.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Lot so most of us know that Justin Timberlake and
Britney Spears dated. They had met yours earlier on the
(20:00):
Mickey Mouse Club, and then they began seeing each other
and at a certain point they were living together while
I believe, on their respective tours, And she talks in
the book about how he cheats on her multiple times,
and she pretty much knows this at the time but
doesn't say anything. She then cheats on him anyhow. It's
(20:21):
you know, it's volatile in some ways, but she still
very much loves him, and then ultimately he breaks up
with her. In a text message while she is filming
one of her videos. So I imagine that was another one
of those moments where she's having to put on a
face and go out and perform while inside she's just reeling.
(20:43):
And so what happens next is she's completely broken, and I,
you know, I remember that feeling of being that age
and being in love and having your heartbroken. And she
just is devastated. So she goes back to her hometown.
She's like sort of comatose. She's in Louisiana. He at
one point comes to visit her, I believe. But then
what happens is he goes on his solo tour. He
(21:05):
puts out the song crimea River, which has the video
that I remember and I'm sure you do too from
that time where there is an actress who looks like
her in the video, who like her, just like her,
and is cheating on him in the video, and so
suddenly it was like, oh, poor Justin Britney cheated on him.
(21:29):
Britney's such a villain, and essentially he pushed that nerrative
forward and she became the villain in this breakup.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
So I think what's so interesting is a lot of
this was known right like before the book, we knew
that they had had this relationship and that he had
framed it as her having cheated on him, and you know,
a couple of years ago, when there was a bit
of a reckoning around her, he did put out this apology.
But the one thing in the book that we did
not know is that she had had an abortion and
(21:59):
that you know, just had really pushed her into that abortion,
and in fairness to him, he sort of said, I'm
not ready to be a father, and you know, she
didn't want to have a kid with someone who didn't want.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
To be a father.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
But she describes it as one of the most agonizing
things she ever had to experience. And there's this really
sad scene where they decide, because they don't want it
to leak, that she has to do a self administered abortion.
She takes pills so she's not under a doctor's care,
and she says it's just like excruciating, and she's just
lying on the floor in the bathroom.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
And then this detail.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I just astriving past.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for knowing exactly what
I'm talking about, because I was like, literally, this is
my worst nightmare. She says at one point, Demerlake thought
music would help, so he went and got his guitar
and he laid there with me strumming it.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
See I I don't know. I was like, they must
have been so they were so young. She's in so
much pain, she's lying on the floor. He must have
just been desperate to try to comfort her in some way.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
That was my interpretation, such a sweet interpretation, because my
interpretation was when I was in my twenties and a
guy pulled out a guitar.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
To stroke It was always horrible.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So the idea that while I'm like lying on the
floor bleeding.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
He's like, hey, baby, I have a song for you.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Just the image in my mind is the I mean,
what you're describing actually is probably more accurate and probably
more sweet, But I just picture this douchebag with his guitar,
and like, it's hard, it's hard not to picture him
as a douchebag. Because there's this whole other scene she
describes of him when they're like walking around in New
York and they run into genuine.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Oh God that I screened. That's actually the one thing
in the whole book that I screenshot in because it
was so Crench.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It's like homie, yeah, yes, yeah, and she's just like
mortified for him. So he does seem so dochey in
this whole thing, Like he does not come off well
but you know, yeah, in fairness, he's pretty young too.
But really, where I think he is the villain is
the crime of the River thing, which you've talked about.
(24:16):
It's like he really leans into this idea that she
has betrayed him. He uses it to promote the album. Yeah,
in large part it's why it sells so much. He
goes on a radio tour, he talks about her sex life.
He reveals that she's not a virgin, which, for whatever reason,
her virginity had become her team has sort of pushed
this idea of her being a virgin, which she wasn't
even when she met justin Timberlake. That's another revelation in
(24:38):
the book. He essentially uses her. She says he's the
first love of her life, he's her first kiss, and
then he completely betrays her, setting the tone for.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Like all the betrayals that are yet to come.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah, and that too, I think is another theme of
the book is all these betrayals by men, largely Yeah.
So significant romantic relationship she has is with Kevin Fetterline,
the father of her children. And the thing that really
stuck out to me and that I just felt for
her so much in her descriptions of that relationship is
(25:15):
when I believe they have one of the kids and
she may be pregnant with another, and he is on
tour because Kevin Fetterline is now kafed and he's like
trying to, you know, establish his rap career and is
getting some small success and is really feeling himself, and
he goes on tour and won't speak to her. So
(25:35):
she flies to New York to talk to her husband
and the security guards turn her away. He literally will
not see his wife who's pregnant with their child. And
then she flies to Vegas to try to talk to
him there, and the same thing happens. And I was
just thinking to myself, can you imagine you're trying to
talk to your partner, the father of your children, and
(25:57):
he just won't even speak to you.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Well, And also, by the way, a man you are
supporting completely like she's paying all his bills. This music career,
in quotes right, is entirely funded by her, and yet
he's suddenly treating her like garbage.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
And I will say she.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Did get a shot off on this, Like at one
point when she was talking about him being a rapper,
she was like, bless his heart.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, I loved that part.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I love that was like the one part where it
was like she was clearly doing a sarcasm line. Whether
that was her or the ghost writer, it worked, Yeah,
it really worked.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And he just is such a scumbag, like he comes
off so poorly. And actually she doesn't go in on
him as much as I expected, and I think in
large part that has to do with the fact that
they are always in this ongoing custody issue with their kids,
even though now the kids are older. But you know,
my takeaway from that is that Kevin essentially used those
kids as a weapon. And you know, from what we
(26:52):
know now, he essentially has never worked since he has
used those kids to support him in his entire family.
He has another family, you know, like a kids and
a wife, and he has never worked since then and
has just completely lived off of her. And he used
those kids like a cudgel to make sure that he
could have access to her money. And that is so
(27:12):
depressing too, because the passages are so touching, how much
she wanted to be a mom, how much those children
meant to her, how much she just like loved to
be around them. And then you know they're so young
when they get taken away from her, they're like five
months and seventeen months, I think, And that's what leads
to the very famous head shaving incident, which she does
(27:34):
address in the book.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, that was one of the parts where I felt
like she did give a little bit more description and
context than had been out there, and so I really
appreciated reading about that. But she was grieving, like she
was grieving the loss of her children, and she was
out of her mind, yeah, in pain and sadness, in panic,
(27:56):
in fear that she would have them taken away permanently.
And so now you can really understand somebody in that state,
like she is absolutely out of her mind with grief
about losing her children.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
And also her aunt, one of her closest relatives, has
just died of cancer. She has postpartum like it's this
perfect storm. Everything is falling apart around her, and now
she's being told she can't see her children and it's
in the midst of that that she goes to try
and see them, and she's turned away, and that's sort
of what leads up to the moment where she goes
into the hair salon and takes the shaver and shaves
(28:33):
her head.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, which, of course, you know, became the cover of
every tabloid in the world, and we've all seen pictures
of It's like, you don't even need to describe it
because we all know it. Yeah, But she describes a
bit about what that was and how in some ways
that was just a fuck you to everyone who had
tried to infantilize her, who'd tried to adultify her, who'd
(28:55):
tried to sexualize her, who tried to make her pretty,
who tried to make her into a good girl, who
had to make her into someone who followed the rules,
Like that was the ultimate thing that she could do
to be like, screw you, I am going to now
be ugly.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
In fact, I think I have a quote from the
book which is I'd been eyeballed so much growing up.
I'd been looked up and down and had people telling
me what they thought of my body since I was
a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my
ways of pushing back, and she says later on, I'd
been the good girl for years. I'd smiled politely while
TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents
said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top,
(29:32):
while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second guessed my
career choices, even though I'd sold millions of records while
my family acted like I was evil and.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I was tired of it.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
It does feel like this moment of rebellion, there's almost
a little bit of Catharsis in it, and then of
course it's immediately turned against her.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Well.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
And the other thing that I found, I don't know,
just sort of harrowing, is that she talks about how
her mom couldn't even look at her with her shaved
heaps yes on, her long beautiful hair was gone, which
was so much a part of her identity, and which
is so much a part of I think pop star
identity in general. Her mother actually couldn't look at her,
(30:12):
and that was so sad to me. So it's like,
at the same time you're reading this and you're thinking, like, oh,
it's so great to hear it in her words. I'm
hearing you read that quote, and I'm like, this doesn't
sound like her, you know, like it's a little heavy handed.
It's like parroting the talking points of like this empowerment,
reclaiming of your identity moment back to the reader. So
(30:35):
I don't know, it's hard. It's like I'm a little
bit torn on how to interpret some of this stuff
because while I think it's so important to hear from
her perspective, I think that there are parts that feel
pretty heavy handed.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I will say the thing about this section that really
stayed with me. This is the time where you really
begin to understand how terrifying the paparazzi was to her.
If there's one thing in the book that becomes very clear,
it's really how afraid of them she was, how aggressive
they were with her, how much of her life was
controlled by their presence, and how much she had to
(31:10):
evade them or try and get away from them. She
wouldn't be able to stay places for very long because
the longer she stayed more would arrive. And I thought
that was interesting because it's kind of changed so much,
like now there are more safeguards in place, especially with children.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
But she was before any of that occurred.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
So people were saying, why won't you let us have
access to photograph your children? And she and Kevin were
having to figure out how to put blankets over their
heads so they could still breathe while carrying them out
of the house because they didn't want them photographed, which
actually it seems like a very sane decision, but that's
crazy when you're doing it right exactly. And back then
the thinking was, well, why is she hiding her kids?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
She just genuinely does not know how to get away
from it. And for all that her father is trying
to control her, he's not doing anything to protect.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Her right, right, right right. For all these supposed safeguards
in place, there are none, as it pertains to this,
and then.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
That obviously leads to the head shaving, leads to her
being institutional. Institution was very briefly, you just put on
like a weekend hold, and then sent on early and
then again, and then that leads to the infamous conservatorship,
which you know, it's been talked about a lot. I
don't know that we have to get into all the details,
but I do think the thing that was most interesting
(32:27):
to me about this is I really have so many
questions about how she got out of it.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Like I don't I know, Well, that was one of
the parts where, you know, my editor brain was like,
h details, details, details, Where are the details? Like how
did you literally change lawyers? How did you argue this?
What exactly was the argument made when you made that
nine to one one call to report your father for
conservatorship abuse? What was the response on the other line?
(32:53):
What then happened? Did the police come to your house?
Like anyway, I have I have so.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Many questions, any questions about this section, and I.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Have to wonder if some of the sanitizing it's for
legal reasons, but even you know, it's like I wanted names.
Like there's a whole section where she describes again being
institutionalized against her will, this time much later, toward the
end of the conservatorship, for a number of months. And
this is the point at which the fans, the Free
(33:20):
Britney fans, start to notice that she has gone away
and they start to get suspicious, and this is when
they start kind of galvanizing to push the questions forward
about what is really happening with its conservatorship. But I'm like,
what is this institution. What is the name of the institution?
How do they she couldn't check herself out? I guess
not because the dad is a conservator, But like, what
(33:42):
was really going on there? And was this a facility
for mental health? Was it a facility for drug abuse?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Like what she calls it a rehab, which is weird
because they're not actually accusing her of taking drugs. She
says she was taking natural supplements and that's what caused
them to send her. But I feel like, also the
thing that was really confusing about this section for me,
is it up until this you really have a clear
sense of how controlled her life is.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Like at one point, she.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Describes her father bugging her house so that he can
overhear her conversations. Right, he decides what she eats, he
decides when she sleeps, he decides every It's like the
most infantilizing thing.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
She can't have caffeine, She's not allowed to have a
sip of alcohol. If she wants to have a boyfriend,
they have to submit to a blood blood test.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Right, So you get the sense that she's under this
enormous control, but then all of a sudden she's able
to escape from it.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
And we don't actually hear how that happens.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Like suddenly she's just like and then I'm meeting with lawyers,
and then I'm calling the police, and you're like, but
how how are you meeting with lawyers?
Speaker 3 (34:43):
You're in this like prison.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Essentially, it feels like a missing like a big missing piece,
and I really just Britney, please, I.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Know the details. And I mean the whole scene in
the when she's institutionalized toward the end of the Conservatorship,
it really, I mean it sounds like Girl Interrupted the
modern version, Like she describes a woman who hears voices,
and there's all these kind of people who are really
really unwell, and then they're force speeding her lithium, which
(35:14):
makes her totally lethargic and confused about time and unable
to speak clearly, like all of these things that sound
like some Sylvia Plath nineteen fifties shit.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yes, And then the next thing that happens, it's like
so quick that section, it's almost like we speed through
the section of how she suddenly breaks free from these
chains that like seem really hard to break free from it.
But then suddenly we're in the section where she is
giving her statement to the judge in the you know,
famous sort of statement she gives that helps free her
(35:46):
from the conservatorship.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Right. I was like, how did she get there? Like,
how did they to get that? Yeah? And then she
had to ask for it to be open to the public,
Like how did that work? Anyhow? Yes, we have.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Questions, yes, and so the testimony, though, is really compelling.
I highly recommend going to listen to it. You can
find it on YouTube. We can play a little bit
of it for you, just so you can hear her voice.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
I also would like to be able to share my
story with the world and what they did to me
instead of it being a hash has secret to benefit
all of them. I want to be able to be
heard on what they did to me. By making me
keep this in for so long is not good for
my heart.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
I mean I remember hearing that when she testified and
thinking it was so powerful, and then reading about it
in the book. I mean again, it's like, how did
she write it? What was the thinking did she rehear?
I don't know. I just she did so.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Many questions that she did a lot of drafts of it,
but but you don't really get a sense of like
where I mean really, I will say. The thing about
the statement that I love is that it is very
much in Brittany's voice. It is obvious she has written
it for herself. You know a lot of times that's
something like this, The lawyers would have just written it
and she would have read it this few like it
is Brittany start to finish. It is in her own words.
(37:03):
Sometimes it's a little circular, sometimes it's a low chaotic,
but it's super strong. You get the sense that she's
completely capable of managing her own life. In fact, it's
just sort of shocking, and she brings.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Us up a lot in the book.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
But I feel like the need to repeat it, which
is it is crazy that she is literally doing world tours,
she is supporting everyone in her family, plus like a
cottage industry of other people, and she is literally being
described as incapacitated, unable to make a single decision for herself,
Like she is clearly more than capable of running her
(37:37):
own life.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Like is she quirky? Is she weird?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Is she sometimes dealing with mental health issues? Sure, but
no more so than a million other celebrities who go
through these things and then just come out the other
side and don't have their family essentially steal their entire
adulthoods so that they can just turn them into like
a cash machine, which is very clearly what happened here.
(38:00):
So she says, you know, in the book, after the conservatorship,
she says, I'd been taught through the conservatorship to feel
almost too fragile, too scared. That's the price I paid
under the conservatorship. They took a lot of my womanhood,
my sword, my core, my voice, the ability to say
fuck you. And I know that sounds bad, but there's
something crucial about this. Don't underestimate your power.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
And while this sounds nice, I.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Do feel like the sort of ending of the book
is a lot about her trying to figure out what
that means, Like, how does that work now that she's free?
Speaker 2 (38:36):
I mean, notably, a lot has changed since the book
was edited. She and her husband have split. He's referenced
in the book as her husband. They didn't have to
ye to edit it. I mean, things have shifted, and yeah,
what does that look like for her? And it's interesting
too what you were saying at the beginning. I mean,
she's dipping her toe and then she's not sure but
(38:57):
now she's put this book out, which has put her
very much in the public liye again, And is that
where she wants to be and will she go back
to performing don't? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Well. Also, there's the interesting thing that did you read
the Instagram post she just posted being like I don't
like what I'm reading.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
About the book?
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Oh I didn't.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, you know, you and I.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Both know how a book works, right, I mean, book
publishing works. The publisher or her press people have clearly
been releasing excerpts of the book on people, and they
have been doing that in a very strategic way, like actually,
I think I said to you at some point last week,
they're doing a great job with the release, because every.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Day it was a new set of headlines. Every day
was like.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Another site, a little bit of information, a little bit
of information out.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, and then you know, but it does make you
wonder how much she's like aware of what her team
is doing as per usual, because then she put out
this statement on October twentieth, and she said, before the
book was out, my book's purpose was not to offend
anyone by any means. That was me then that is
in the past. I don't like the headlines I'm reading.
That's exactly why.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
I the business four years ago. Right.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So it's like, you don't like the headlines you're reading,
like that's what's selling your book, Like you're booking through
the presales, right, and this is why. So it's like
an interesting thing, right again, she has this relationship with
the process. She doesn't like the way fame works, and
yet it is the way it works. Like it's like
she's gonna have to either decide that she wants to
(40:24):
really run away from it or she wants to be
part of it. And if she's going to be part
of it, I do think she hasn't yet figured out
what that looks like, what she's okay with, how much
she's willing to give away for it. And I think
her Instagram is such a great example of this, right,
Like she is constantly shutting down her Instagram and then
(40:46):
coming back, like she she wants the attention of the Instagram,
but then something happens it makes her mad and she leaves.
And in fact, right after she posted this Instagram about
not liking the book headlines, she shut down her Instagram
and then she was back within a day. You know,
it's like this sort of perfect microcosm of her larger
relationship with attention. And there was that incident recently where
(41:07):
she was dancing with knives. Do you remember this, Yes?
I do. She's like dancing with the knives, and so
then her fans call the police and have them do
a welfare check on her, and so it's like she
can't even in.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
The they were real knives, right like she says they
were prop knives.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, I mean, even if they were real knives, they
weren't dangerous, Like there was nothing dangerous about her dance routine.
But you know, she does address that in the book.
She addresses the way people react to her Instagram, because
there's also a lot of nudity in her Instagram and
her children have complained about that or I don't know
if it's her children or Kevin Federline or whatever, but
it has been said that her children don't like that,
and it's very provocative at times.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
At some point she got a.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Stripper pole, and I think people don't really know how
to respond to it, and she says something about it.
She says, I know that a lot of people don't
understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or
new dresses. But I think if they'd been photographed by
other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for people's approval,
they'd understand that I get a lot of joy from
(42:06):
posing the way I feel sexy in taking my own picture,
which I don't. Does that totally make sense? I don't
know why it didn't totally make sense to me?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Is an?
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I mean, I think because there are hints of a
ghostwriter or an editor saying the thing that they know
needs to be said to justify the behavior in a
way that's palatable to the reader.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, Like I was confused by that.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I don't know. I mean, it doesn't I guess it
doesn't have to make sense, but I don't. I mean,
the thing that makes me so uncomfortable about Brittany in
a lot of ways is that everyone thinks they know, yeah,
and nobody really fucking knows. The fans don't know. The
(42:51):
free Brittany people don't know. I mean, maybe the ghostwriter knows.
But the ghost writer has an agenda to make the
book palatable and make it so that there's not legal
issues and make it so that she's not getting criticized
for X y and Z and you know, being the
right amount of me. And when she calls Jamie Lynn
her little sister, a real bitch. Yeah, but also like
(43:13):
kind of making up word in the end. So it
still is like everyone has an agenda, I mean everyone.
It's like the critics have an agenda, the publicists have
an agenda, the ghost writer has an agenda, the book
editor has an agenda. So it is hard to tell.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean even some of the fans, right, Like even
some of the fans, like some of the Free Brittany
movement was attention for fans and gave them sort of
purpose and meaning, and so some of them haven't been
able to let it go.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Like there's also think they know best for her for
her Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
And it's tough too, because the Free Brittany movement was right,
like they did actually draw attention. She writes about it
in the book, to the fact that she was trapped
in this thing, and she actually thanks them in the
book for that. But by the same token, there seems
to be this sense that everyone knows what's best for
(44:09):
Britney Spears. And I don't know that any of us
know what's best for Britney Spears.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
I think that's right, and actually this is a good
place to end it because there was a quote from
the book I pulled which I felt like to me
was the essence of the book.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
So I will read it and we can end on that.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Note great, which is on page two forty eight, she says,
I guess what I'm saying is that the mystery of
who the real me is is to my advantage because
nobody knows.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's sort of that's funny, that's weird. I read it.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
You've read this whole book and you still don't know
about me.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
That is a good place to end it. I mean, yeah,
the reality is we don't know, but we will all
still keep talking about it.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
This is in retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Is there a cultural moment you can't stop thinking about
and want us to explore in a future episode. Email
us at inretropod at gmail dot com, or find us
on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at susib NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist
Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media.
Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and
associate producer.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Our artwork is from Pentagram.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Additional editing help from Mary Doo and Mike Cosparelli. Sound
correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your
hosts Susie Bannecarum.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
And Jessica Bennett. We're also executive producers for even more
check out inretropod dot com. See you next week.
I almost wish it had just been written like her
chaotic captions on Instagra.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, I know, I was thinking that a bit too.
I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie Beannacher and this is
in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment
from the past that shaped us.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
This week we have a special episode. The long awaited
memoir from Britney Spears has finally hit stands, and Susie
and I have stayed up all night reading it and
we're here to talk about it. It's Britney Bitch. Okay,
give me your first impressions. I know you were up
for a while last night reading delving into this memoir.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Well, my first impressions are a lot of the book
has been covered in the last week or so, so
a lot of the sort of big surprises have already
been revealed.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It was sort of interesting to read it.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
For yourself, though, because I felt like in some ways
it answers some questions. Yeah, but there are still so
many questions unanswered, Like I have so many questions that
we can talk about as we go through some of
the topic.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Areas in a weird way. It feels a little thin.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I hate to say that, because getting to hear from
Brittany herself after so long, and after she felt like
her voice had been essentially extinguished for so.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Long, is you know, valuable. But in a weird way,
I feel like.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I've learned more about her from following her Instagram than
I did in this book, because in some ways it
feels very sanitized. It feels very much like it's been
polished for a mainstream audience. Yeah, and then they just like,
you know, dropped in some you know, sealacious revelations because
they knew that's what would sell the book, which isn't
(01:57):
entirely fair to Brittany because she has a ghostwriter. So
there's a lot going on here that goes into a book,
right that you know isn't just from the author.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
What were your first impressions?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, I mean, we know so much about Britney Spears,
like for better or worse. I think a lot of
us who have followed her case and the conservatorship and
read the articles about it and were fans back in
the day, we just know a lot. And so to
read a book you're kind of expecting to get things
that you didn't already know, and in fact, she does,
I think, confirm a lot of things that were suspected.
(02:31):
But like you said, it feels thin and parts. It's
pretty vague in some of the areas where I really
wanted details, And I found myself, like a couple of
hours in just frantically googling who the ghostwriter was because
I wanted more information about that person.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What did you find? I'm actually curious.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
He's a journalist. There's not much there. I don't know.
I don't know it would be fascinating to hear from him,
because there were just lines in it where I was like,
that just doesn't sound like her, and who I'm to
say what sounds like Britney spears? But as you said,
we know so much about how she is today from
her Instagram, or at least we think we know that.
(03:09):
We kind of have this idea in our minds of
what her voice sounds like, and it's not quite as
polished as I think the book is.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, it's interesting she chose a man as the ghostwriter.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I don't think I realized that because I think the
name is like Sam something, It's like a generic name
that could be either way, and I assumed.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was a woman just because interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So much of the book is about this tension in
her life of is she a child, you know, sort
of the line from her song not a girl, not
yet a woman, This kind of tension of was she
allowed to grow up?
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Did she grow up too fast? Has she not grown
up at all? So it feels like a woman might
have handled it better. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I mean, there are definitely lines where you're like, Brittany
definitely didn't say this, and then there are lines where
it clearly is something that Brittany said, like that he's
trying to infuse her voice in it.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Well, did you notice that I swear to God. There's
a lot of I swear to God. I swear to God, Yeah,
which I thought was cute.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And then there was like some repetitiveness that you felt
had to have come from her, right, because why would
he just be like repeating things if they weren't from
her perspective. I almost wish, I mean, this is one
of those wishes that would never come true, but I
almost wish it had just been written like her chaotic
captions on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, I know, I was thinking that a bit too. Well.
It's interesting because one of the last big celebrity memoirs
that we read, I think, was Pamela Anderson's, and she
wrote that book herself, and it was really chaotic at times,
like there were these huge swaths of her poetry that
would just come in the middle of chapters. That was
a little strange, but it really felt like her and
(04:42):
I was sort of like, oh, I wish we were
getting some long rambling for any captions. Yeah, in the
middle of this, Like I.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Almost feel like they could have just woven that in
or something, because we do know that's her voice. We
know her voice now, you know. The one other thing
I want to say, because you mentioned like for those
of us who followed her, like we sort of know
so much about her, and that's true. I mean I
obviously followed Brittany. I was a huge fan. I am
a huge fan. I don't know if you know this
about me, but one of my greatest accomplishments of all
(05:08):
time is that Britney Spears follows me on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That's actually amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
It's like less meaningful now that none of us are
on Twitter. But I think the reason she follows me.
I never figured out when she started following me. I
just noticed one day she was and was like, this
is it. I can retire now. I think it's because
when she did her speech to the court about her conservatorship,
I had a tweet that went viral about how lucid
(05:36):
she sounded and how much you can just tell that
she actually was perfectly capable of managing herself. And I
have to assume that's why she started following me. But anyway,
what occurred to me when I was reading all this
last night is that it's easy to forget because she's
come to represent so many things beyond what she's accomplished,
(05:57):
just how insanely accomplished.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
She she is. Yeah, I know, it's almost like she
was going through and then this album came out, and
then this album came out, like in these really short
time spans, it almost was if she could have spent
more time discussing it, Like it's just incredible her her production.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, she sold one hundred and fifty
million records worldwide. She's sold seventy million in the US alone,
She's got fifteen Guinness World Records. Like I didn't even
have all it's like, you know, she has Grammys, she
has MPTV work, She's done all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
She could have filled the whole book just.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, with just her accomplishments.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And she is a genius in this arena, like she
in many ways outside of Madonna, has come to be
synonymous with pop music.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
So one of the things I feel a little sad
about in the book is how much of the book
is about all this other bullshit and how she doesn't
get to really be like, I am amazing. I mean,
she you definitely see that in her you see her
grasping for that, but she's been made to feel small
for so long that it's almost she just mentions it
(07:07):
the way I mentioned graduating from college, you know what
I mean, She's like and then that Grammy and then yeah,
everything happened, and I'm like, dude, that's crazy.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Right right.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Some things that I didn't know beforehand that I think
the book really hit on. She really starts from the beginning.
It's sort of a narrative arc of her life chronologically,
and she had a lot of trauma in her childhood,
like real, real trauma, like abuse and violence and alcoholism,
(07:40):
and you know, the death of a grandmother and starting
drinking when she was I think at age thirteen with
her mom and so much of the stuff that it's
easy to see how there would be lasting effects of that.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should have said at
the top of this spoiler alert because we are going
to talk about something in the.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Books spoiler alert and spoiler alert.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
So one thing I do want to mention in that regard,
I was really shocked by the story about her dad's mom.
Like the book starts with this anecdote where her father's
mother died by suicide and you know, in this very
dramatic way she had lost a child and she goes
and she I think she shoots herself on the grave,
(08:26):
and so it really does set the tone for like
how traumatic her entire childhood would be, really at the
hands of her father primarily, but also she has a
lot of resentment about her mother and the way that
her mother created an environment that was like very chaotic
and there was a lot of screaming, and so you know,
(08:49):
the first bit of the book is really about how
she escaped into herself, into her music, that that's how
she sort of found some freedom, and then pretty early on.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
She starts performing.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Right very early on. The Other thing that was noteworthy
is that the mother who commits suicide was Gene, which
is her middle nameleness. She was named after her. But yeah,
that really does set the tone at the very beginning
of the book.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yeah, there are like two sort of central tensions in
the book. One is I mean, obviously, the book is
(09:37):
titled The Woman in Me, so this idea of being
a woman is very central to the book. But the
way it's presented is sort of this tension between not
a girl, not yet a woman?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Is she a child? She talks a.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Lot about regressing, like she talks about Benjamin Button a lot,
and how when things are hard or difficult for her
she quotes ages backwards. She has this real sense that
when she is vulnerable, she starts to feel like a child,
and that just as she is becoming a woman, just
as she is finally getting to the point where she
(10:15):
might have been able to take ownership of her own life,
this incident occurs this period of time after her children,
and then her father puts her in this conservatorship and
then she is essentially infantilized for thirteen years. So then
she is just literally not allowed to become a woman.
But at the same time, you know, she has had
(10:36):
the adult responsibility of supporting her entire family since she
was fifteen, right, So it is like this sort of
thing that she keeps returning to, like was I a child?
Was I a ghost child? At one point she says,
or I felt like a ghost child? Am I a woman?
What does it mean to be a woman? It's like
a very central theme of the book. Did that feel
(10:57):
like it landed for you?
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah? I mean, I think that's something that we've talked
about prior to reading any of this, and just our
observations is that there is this sort of sense of
like she didn't get to fully grow up, and there's
some ways about her that feel really frozen in time,
like she is still living in the early two thousands,
and she does still feel much younger than she is,
(11:23):
but like you said, in so many ways, she was
adultified when she was so young. Like she talks about
various interviews in the media, and who is the interview
with the old guy Ed something?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Oh you mean the story with Ed McMahon.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Oh yeah, McMahon, Okay, yes, so Ed McMahon on Star Search.
I can't remember exactly how old she is, but she's
very young. She's not yet a teenager. And she goes
on and they have this banter and he's asking her
if she has a boyfriend. First of all, it's too
young for her to be having a boyfriend, but then
he's like, what about me? Yes, And this is like
a I don't know how old he was. I remember
him having gray hair, but just little things like that
(11:59):
that she touches on. It various points where it's like
she's being treated like an adult but at the same
time totally infantilized as she actually grows older.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, it's like funny because I mean, honestly, I used
to watch Star Starge. I guess we're going back to
the narrative of how much TV I want, you know.
I think he was trying to be like charming. It's
like a banter like do you have any boyfriends? And
she's like boys are gross or boys are mean? Yeah,
She's like, I'm not mean, you know, and he thinks
it's sweet. But another tension in this book, which is
(12:29):
I think the second central attention, is this idea that
she craves attention. She wants to perform she wants to
be on stage, she wants attention, but also when it happens,
it terrifies her, Like she literally goes backstage after that
moment with Ed McMahon and she weeps, and she constantly
(12:49):
talks about wanting the spotlight but then needing to get
away from it. And then it gets worse. The spotlight
keeps getting harsher and harsher, like as time goes on,
it's like the attention gets crueler, it gets more aggressive,
it becomes physically violent with the paparazzi, and so she
is constantly dipping her toe out and then running away,
(13:11):
dipping her toe out and running away. And now she
is again in this situation where she has to kind
of decide like how much is she going to return
to public life, right Like she sort of said after
the conservatorship that she wasn't going to do that, She's
just going to like chill for a bit, But this
(13:31):
book is a return to public life, right, So there
is this feeling that you get that she can't quite
decide what she wants her relationship to be to attention.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, and it was interesting too, I didn't know that
she had social anxiety and So she talks about that
in the book and she names it as such, and
she describes how, you know, yeah, of course she could
go on stage and she could perform for thousands of
people and do it well, but then in small groups
she would have a lot of anxiety and get really
(14:02):
self conscious and be really embarrassed about what she would say.
And that too, is sort of an interesting tension. I mean,
there's a lot of these tensions and sort of juxtapositions
in the way that she is or has come to be,
and I feel like that was another one.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The other thing that's interesting is she mentions that when
she became a judge on Fear Factor many years later, Yeah,
she hated it, like she hated the.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Pressure of it. She didn't like judging other people.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
She which was so surprising. So because do you think
of her as such an amazing performer.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Another way in which this comes out is the way
she describes as Diane Sawyer interview as so horrible for her. Yes,
let's back up for a second, yeah and explain what
that is. So there's the whole Justin section. We'll get
into Justin and all of that. But after her breakup
with justin Timberlake. Her father essentially forces her, her father
and her team force her to do this interview with
(14:53):
Diane Sawyer, who you know was his former boss, my
former boss, and who was literally one of the most
famous women in the world, another one of these sort
of like big name interviewers. And she describes this interview
as really a breaking point for her. She had a
horrible time. She felt like it was so harsh. And
what's so interesting is when you watch it, because of
course I rewatched the whole thing over the weekend, is
(15:16):
she's actually handling herself with enormous poison.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yes, like she is.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Actually totally on it. She seems incredibly smart. She comes
across as in control of the situation she's in, and
yet what she is feeling is all this anxiety, all
this pressure. And so it's interesting that she does have
this ability to mask, right, which I think is very
common of people who come from traumatic childhoods, Right, that
(15:44):
like you kind of have to have a public persona
because otherwise everyone knows all the crazy things in your house.
So you just like put on this mask and you
go out there and you pretend like everything's fine, and
then the minute you're alone again, you can kind of
fall apart. And that's kind of what she describes that inners.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Right, And I mean, I imagine that's such a big
part of being a performer too. You have to put
on a brave face and you have to look good
while doing it, and so you go out there and
you do it, and whatever is festering underneath the surface
stays there until you get backstage, and she does at
many different points throughout the book describe weeping backstage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Actually, did you see that Katie Perry clip that went viral? Oh,
it's like, yeah, it actually went viral recently, but it's
from an old documentary about her where Russell Brand breaks
up with or like he's telling her he's divorcing her,
either over text or he calls her. It's like it's horrible,
and she's literally about to go on stage and she's weeping,
and then she like shakes herself off and she literally
like gets on one of those lifts that's gonna pull
(16:42):
her up on stage and the next thing you know,
she's just like snapped into it and she's like performing.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And that's sort of what I kept picturing when Brittany
was describing that. So the interesting thing about the Dane
Swear interview is like, honestly, I did not I don't know,
you know, if you've watched it recently, I don't think
the questions are so cruel, Like there are definitely some
questions you just wouldn't ask now, you would just acknowledge
that she was, like I think she was twenty or
(17:09):
twenty one at the time, So there are just some
questions like an adult woman wouldn't ask what is essentially
still like a child about her love life or her virginity,
which is you know, crazy. So there are definitely some
things that feel dated. But she is trying to be empathic.
I mean, I just know when Diane is being harsh
(17:30):
and when she is trying to connect to me. It
was very clear that she was trying to connect. So
it's also interesting what a divide there is from what
I think Diane was trying to do and how Brittany
received it. And I think a lot of that has
to do with the fact that she sort of says
I was so raw, I was so vulnerable.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I had just gone through this breakup with Justin and.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I wasn't ready to have it mined and she there's
a part where she cries and you can see she's
so upset that she's crying. She literally says ooh oh, like.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Oh I remember watching this, Yeah, yes.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Oh my goodness, hello ew strong leaning oh And in
that moment you see that she's like, doesn't want to
be mined in this way, and she's trying to protect herself.
But that just by virtue of being here, that's impossible.
And I think that's also something that's changed in culture,
(18:29):
Like now you would just release something on Instagram, you
wouldn't need to do that. Diane Sawyer interview.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I mean, the other thing that is so horrowing to
read about is just how much control her father had
over her life. I Mean, obviously we knew that that's
what the whole conservatorship was about, but even with this interview,
which was before the conservatorship, he shows up with the
whole team and basically demands that she's gonna go on
the show. She has no prep time. You know, she
(18:56):
doesn't want to do it, but he says what.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Well, and she's also she says a lot about how
she's a people pleaser, so she also has a hard
time saying no, even when she doesn't want to do something.
A different sort of star might have said, like no,
get out of my apartment, I'm not doing it, but
that she sort of does have this. I think she
kind of describes this all like a Southern desire to
be a good girl to please. Not to say too much,
(19:21):
but I think it's probably worth actually backing up and
explaining why she's doing this interview, because it's essentially because
Justin Timberlake has broken her heart and is waging a
sort of publicity battle against her. So let's talk about
the Justin parts of the book, because they are a.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Lot so most of us know that Justin Timberlake and
Britney Spears dated. They had met yours earlier on the
(20:00):
Mickey Mouse Club, and then they began seeing each other
and at a certain point they were living together while
I believe, on their respective tours, And she talks in
the book about how he cheats on her multiple times,
and she pretty much knows this at the time but
doesn't say anything. She then cheats on him anyhow. It's
(20:21):
you know, it's volatile in some ways, but she still
very much loves him, and then ultimately he breaks up
with her. In a text message while she is filming
one of her videos. So I imagine that was another one
of those moments where she's having to put on a
face and go out and perform while inside she's just reeling.
(20:43):
And so what happens next is she's completely broken, and I,
you know, I remember that feeling of being that age
and being in love and having your heartbroken. And she
just is devastated. So she goes back to her hometown.
She's like sort of comatose. She's in Louisiana. He at
one point comes to visit her, I believe. But then
what happens is he goes on his solo tour. He
(21:05):
puts out the song crimea River, which has the video
that I remember and I'm sure you do too from
that time where there is an actress who looks like
her in the video, who like her, just like her,
and is cheating on him in the video, and so
suddenly it was like, oh, poor Justin Britney cheated on him.
(21:29):
Britney's such a villain, and essentially he pushed that nerrative
forward and she became the villain in this breakup.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
So I think what's so interesting is a lot of
this was known right like before the book, we knew
that they had had this relationship and that he had
framed it as her having cheated on him, and you know,
a couple of years ago, when there was a bit
of a reckoning around her, he did put out this apology.
But the one thing in the book that we did
not know is that she had had an abortion and
(21:59):
that you know, just had really pushed her into that abortion,
and in fairness to him, he sort of said, I'm
not ready to be a father, and you know, she
didn't want to have a kid with someone who didn't want.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
To be a father.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
But she describes it as one of the most agonizing
things she ever had to experience. And there's this really
sad scene where they decide, because they don't want it
to leak, that she has to do a self administered abortion.
She takes pills so she's not under a doctor's care,
and she says it's just like excruciating, and she's just
lying on the floor in the bathroom.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
And then this detail.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I just astriving past.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for knowing exactly what
I'm talking about, because I was like, literally, this is
my worst nightmare. She says at one point, Demerlake thought
music would help, so he went and got his guitar
and he laid there with me strumming it.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
See I I don't know. I was like, they must
have been so they were so young. She's in so
much pain, she's lying on the floor. He must have
just been desperate to try to comfort her in some way.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
That was my interpretation, such a sweet interpretation, because my
interpretation was when I was in my twenties and a
guy pulled out a guitar.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
To stroke It was always horrible.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So the idea that while I'm like lying on the
floor bleeding.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
He's like, hey, baby, I have a song for you.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Just the image in my mind is the I mean,
what you're describing actually is probably more accurate and probably
more sweet, But I just picture this douchebag with his guitar,
and like, it's hard, it's hard not to picture him
as a douchebag. Because there's this whole other scene she
describes of him when they're like walking around in New
York and they run into genuine.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Oh God that I screened. That's actually the one thing
in the whole book that I screenshot in because it
was so Crench.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It's like homie, yeah, yes, yeah, and she's just like
mortified for him. So he does seem so dochey in
this whole thing, Like he does not come off well
but you know, yeah, in fairness, he's pretty young too.
But really, where I think he is the villain is
the crime of the River thing, which you've talked about.
(24:16):
It's like he really leans into this idea that she
has betrayed him. He uses it to promote the album. Yeah,
in large part it's why it sells so much. He
goes on a radio tour, he talks about her sex life.
He reveals that she's not a virgin, which, for whatever reason,
her virginity had become her team has sort of pushed
this idea of her being a virgin, which she wasn't
even when she met justin Timberlake. That's another revelation in
(24:38):
the book. He essentially uses her. She says he's the
first love of her life, he's her first kiss, and
then he completely betrays her, setting the tone for.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Like all the betrayals that are yet to come.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah, and that too, I think is another theme of
the book is all these betrayals by men, largely Yeah.
So significant romantic relationship she has is with Kevin Fetterline,
the father of her children. And the thing that really
stuck out to me and that I just felt for
her so much in her descriptions of that relationship is
(25:15):
when I believe they have one of the kids and
she may be pregnant with another, and he is on
tour because Kevin Fetterline is now kafed and he's like
trying to, you know, establish his rap career and is
getting some small success and is really feeling himself, and
he goes on tour and won't speak to her. So
(25:35):
she flies to New York to talk to her husband
and the security guards turn her away. He literally will
not see his wife who's pregnant with their child. And
then she flies to Vegas to try to talk to
him there, and the same thing happens. And I was
just thinking to myself, can you imagine you're trying to
talk to your partner, the father of your children, and
(25:57):
he just won't even speak to you.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Well, And also, by the way, a man you are
supporting completely like she's paying all his bills. This music career,
in quotes right, is entirely funded by her, and yet
he's suddenly treating her like garbage.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
And I will say she.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Did get a shot off on this, Like at one
point when she was talking about him being a rapper,
she was like, bless his heart.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, I loved that part.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I love that was like the one part where it
was like she was clearly doing a sarcasm line. Whether
that was her or the ghost writer, it worked, Yeah,
it really worked.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And he just is such a scumbag, like he comes
off so poorly. And actually she doesn't go in on
him as much as I expected, and I think in
large part that has to do with the fact that
they are always in this ongoing custody issue with their kids,
even though now the kids are older. But you know,
my takeaway from that is that Kevin essentially used those
kids as a weapon. And you know, from what we
(26:52):
know now, he essentially has never worked since he has
used those kids to support him in his entire family.
He has another family, you know, like a kids and
a wife, and he has never worked since then and
has just completely lived off of her. And he used
those kids like a cudgel to make sure that he
could have access to her money. And that is so
(27:12):
depressing too, because the passages are so touching, how much
she wanted to be a mom, how much those children
meant to her, how much she just like loved to
be around them. And then you know they're so young
when they get taken away from her, they're like five
months and seventeen months, I think, And that's what leads
to the very famous head shaving incident, which she does
(27:34):
address in the book.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, that was one of the parts where I felt
like she did give a little bit more description and
context than had been out there, and so I really
appreciated reading about that. But she was grieving, like she
was grieving the loss of her children, and she was
out of her mind, yeah, in pain and sadness, in panic,
(27:56):
in fear that she would have them taken away permanently.
And so now you can really understand somebody in that state,
like she is absolutely out of her mind with grief
about losing her children.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
And also her aunt, one of her closest relatives, has
just died of cancer. She has postpartum like it's this
perfect storm. Everything is falling apart around her, and now
she's being told she can't see her children and it's
in the midst of that that she goes to try
and see them, and she's turned away, and that's sort
of what leads up to the moment where she goes
into the hair salon and takes the shaver and shaves
(28:33):
her head.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, which, of course, you know, became the cover of
every tabloid in the world, and we've all seen pictures
of It's like, you don't even need to describe it
because we all know it. Yeah, But she describes a
bit about what that was and how in some ways
that was just a fuck you to everyone who had
tried to infantilize her, who'd tried to adultify her, who'd
(28:55):
tried to sexualize her, who tried to make her pretty,
who tried to make her into a good girl, who
had to make her into someone who followed the rules,
Like that was the ultimate thing that she could do
to be like, screw you, I am going to now
be ugly.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
In fact, I think I have a quote from the
book which is I'd been eyeballed so much growing up.
I'd been looked up and down and had people telling
me what they thought of my body since I was
a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my
ways of pushing back, and she says later on, I'd
been the good girl for years. I'd smiled politely while
TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents
said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top,
(29:32):
while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second guessed my
career choices, even though I'd sold millions of records while
my family acted like I was evil and.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I was tired of it.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
It does feel like this moment of rebellion, there's almost
a little bit of Catharsis in it, and then of
course it's immediately turned against her.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Well.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
And the other thing that I found, I don't know,
just sort of harrowing, is that she talks about how
her mom couldn't even look at her with her shaved
heaps yes on, her long beautiful hair was gone, which
was so much a part of her identity, and which
is so much a part of I think pop star
identity in general. Her mother actually couldn't look at her,
(30:12):
and that was so sad to me. So it's like,
at the same time you're reading this and you're thinking, like, oh,
it's so great to hear it in her words. I'm
hearing you read that quote, and I'm like, this doesn't
sound like her, you know, like it's a little heavy handed.
It's like parroting the talking points of like this empowerment,
reclaiming of your identity moment back to the reader. So
(30:35):
I don't know, it's hard. It's like I'm a little
bit torn on how to interpret some of this stuff
because while I think it's so important to hear from
her perspective, I think that there are parts that feel
pretty heavy handed.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I will say the thing about this section that really
stayed with me. This is the time where you really
begin to understand how terrifying the paparazzi was to her.
If there's one thing in the book that becomes very clear,
it's really how afraid of them she was, how aggressive
they were with her, how much of her life was
controlled by their presence, and how much she had to
(31:10):
evade them or try and get away from them. She
wouldn't be able to stay places for very long because
the longer she stayed more would arrive. And I thought
that was interesting because it's kind of changed so much,
like now there are more safeguards in place, especially with children.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
But she was before any of that occurred.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
So people were saying, why won't you let us have
access to photograph your children? And she and Kevin were
having to figure out how to put blankets over their
heads so they could still breathe while carrying them out
of the house because they didn't want them photographed, which
actually it seems like a very sane decision, but that's
crazy when you're doing it right exactly. And back then
the thinking was, well, why is she hiding her kids?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
She just genuinely does not know how to get away
from it. And for all that her father is trying
to control her, he's not doing anything to protect.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Her right, right, right right. For all these supposed safeguards
in place, there are none, as it pertains to this,
and then.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
That obviously leads to the head shaving, leads to her
being institutional. Institution was very briefly, you just put on
like a weekend hold, and then sent on early and
then again, and then that leads to the infamous conservatorship,
which you know, it's been talked about a lot. I
don't know that we have to get into all the details,
but I do think the thing that was most interesting
(32:27):
to me about this is I really have so many
questions about how she got out of it.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Like I don't I know, Well, that was one of
the parts where, you know, my editor brain was like,
h details, details, details, Where are the details? Like how
did you literally change lawyers? How did you argue this?
What exactly was the argument made when you made that
nine to one one call to report your father for
conservatorship abuse? What was the response on the other line?
(32:53):
What then happened? Did the police come to your house?
Like anyway, I have I have so.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Many questions, any questions about this section, and I.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Have to wonder if some of the sanitizing it's for
legal reasons, but even you know, it's like I wanted names.
Like there's a whole section where she describes again being
institutionalized against her will, this time much later, toward the
end of the conservatorship, for a number of months. And
this is the point at which the fans, the Free
(33:20):
Britney fans, start to notice that she has gone away
and they start to get suspicious, and this is when
they start kind of galvanizing to push the questions forward
about what is really happening with its conservatorship. But I'm like,
what is this institution. What is the name of the institution?
How do they she couldn't check herself out? I guess
not because the dad is a conservator, But like, what
(33:42):
was really going on there? And was this a facility
for mental health? Was it a facility for drug abuse?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Like what she calls it a rehab, which is weird
because they're not actually accusing her of taking drugs. She
says she was taking natural supplements and that's what caused
them to send her. But I feel like, also the
thing that was really confusing about this section for me,
is it up until this you really have a clear
sense of how controlled her life is.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Like at one point, she.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Describes her father bugging her house so that he can
overhear her conversations. Right, he decides what she eats, he
decides when she sleeps, he decides every It's like the
most infantilizing thing.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
She can't have caffeine, She's not allowed to have a
sip of alcohol. If she wants to have a boyfriend,
they have to submit to a blood blood test.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Right, So you get the sense that she's under this
enormous control, but then all of a sudden she's able
to escape from it.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
And we don't actually hear how that happens.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Like suddenly she's just like and then I'm meeting with lawyers,
and then I'm calling the police, and you're like, but
how how are you meeting with lawyers?
Speaker 3 (34:43):
You're in this like prison.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Essentially, it feels like a missing like a big missing piece,
and I really just Britney, please, I.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Know the details. And I mean the whole scene in
the when she's institutionalized toward the end of the Conservatorship,
it really, I mean it sounds like Girl Interrupted the
modern version, Like she describes a woman who hears voices,
and there's all these kind of people who are really
really unwell, and then they're force speeding her lithium, which
(35:14):
makes her totally lethargic and confused about time and unable
to speak clearly, like all of these things that sound
like some Sylvia Plath nineteen fifties shit.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yes, And then the next thing that happens, it's like
so quick that section, it's almost like we speed through
the section of how she suddenly breaks free from these
chains that like seem really hard to break free from it.
But then suddenly we're in the section where she is
giving her statement to the judge in the you know,
famous sort of statement she gives that helps free her
(35:46):
from the conservatorship.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Right. I was like, how did she get there? Like,
how did they to get that? Yeah? And then she
had to ask for it to be open to the public,
Like how did that work? Anyhow? Yes, we have.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Questions, yes, and so the testimony, though, is really compelling.
I highly recommend going to listen to it. You can
find it on YouTube. We can play a little bit
of it for you, just so you can hear her voice.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
I also would like to be able to share my
story with the world and what they did to me
instead of it being a hash has secret to benefit
all of them. I want to be able to be
heard on what they did to me. By making me
keep this in for so long is not good for
my heart.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
I mean I remember hearing that when she testified and
thinking it was so powerful, and then reading about it
in the book. I mean again, it's like, how did
she write it? What was the thinking did she rehear?
I don't know. I just she did so.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
Many questions that she did a lot of drafts of it,
but but you don't really get a sense of like
where I mean really, I will say. The thing about
the statement that I love is that it is very
much in Brittany's voice. It is obvious she has written
it for herself. You know a lot of times that's
something like this, The lawyers would have just written it
and she would have read it this few like it
is Brittany start to finish. It is in her own words.
(37:03):
Sometimes it's a little circular, sometimes it's a low chaotic,
but it's super strong. You get the sense that she's
completely capable of managing her own life. In fact, it's
just sort of shocking, and she brings.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Us up a lot in the book.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
But I feel like the need to repeat it, which
is it is crazy that she is literally doing world tours,
she is supporting everyone in her family, plus like a
cottage industry of other people, and she is literally being
described as incapacitated, unable to make a single decision for herself,
Like she is clearly more than capable of running her
(37:37):
own life.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Like is she quirky? Is she weird?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Is she sometimes dealing with mental health issues? Sure, but
no more so than a million other celebrities who go
through these things and then just come out the other
side and don't have their family essentially steal their entire
adulthoods so that they can just turn them into like
a cash machine, which is very clearly what happened here.
(38:00):
So she says, you know, in the book, after the conservatorship,
she says, I'd been taught through the conservatorship to feel
almost too fragile, too scared. That's the price I paid
under the conservatorship. They took a lot of my womanhood,
my sword, my core, my voice, the ability to say
fuck you. And I know that sounds bad, but there's
something crucial about this. Don't underestimate your power.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
And while this sounds nice, I.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Do feel like the sort of ending of the book
is a lot about her trying to figure out what
that means, Like, how does that work now that she's free?
Speaker 2 (38:36):
I mean, notably, a lot has changed since the book
was edited. She and her husband have split. He's referenced
in the book as her husband. They didn't have to
ye to edit it. I mean, things have shifted, and yeah,
what does that look like for her? And it's interesting
too what you were saying at the beginning. I mean,
she's dipping her toe and then she's not sure but
(38:57):
now she's put this book out, which has put her
very much in the public liye again, And is that
where she wants to be and will she go back
to performing don't? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Well. Also, there's the interesting thing that did you read
the Instagram post she just posted being like I don't
like what I'm reading.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
About the book?
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Oh I didn't.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, you know, you and I.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Both know how a book works, right, I mean, book
publishing works. The publisher or her press people have clearly
been releasing excerpts of the book on people, and they
have been doing that in a very strategic way, like actually,
I think I said to you at some point last week,
they're doing a great job with the release, because every.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Day it was a new set of headlines. Every day
was like.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Another site, a little bit of information, a little bit
of information out.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, and then you know, but it does make you
wonder how much she's like aware of what her team
is doing as per usual, because then she put out
this statement on October twentieth, and she said, before the
book was out, my book's purpose was not to offend
anyone by any means. That was me then that is
in the past. I don't like the headlines I'm reading.
That's exactly why.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
I the business four years ago. Right.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So it's like, you don't like the headlines you're reading,
like that's what's selling your book, Like you're booking through
the presales, right, and this is why. So it's like
an interesting thing, right again, she has this relationship with
the process. She doesn't like the way fame works, and
yet it is the way it works. Like it's like
she's gonna have to either decide that she wants to
(40:24):
really run away from it or she wants to be
part of it. And if she's going to be part
of it, I do think she hasn't yet figured out
what that looks like, what she's okay with, how much
she's willing to give away for it. And I think
her Instagram is such a great example of this, right,
Like she is constantly shutting down her Instagram and then
(40:46):
coming back, like she she wants the attention of the Instagram,
but then something happens it makes her mad and she leaves.
And in fact, right after she posted this Instagram about
not liking the book headlines, she shut down her Instagram
and then she was back within a day. You know,
it's like this sort of perfect microcosm of her larger
relationship with attention. And there was that incident recently where
(41:07):
she was dancing with knives. Do you remember this, Yes?
I do. She's like dancing with the knives, and so
then her fans call the police and have them do
a welfare check on her, and so it's like she
can't even in.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
The they were real knives, right like she says they
were prop knives.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, I mean, even if they were real knives, they
weren't dangerous, Like there was nothing dangerous about her dance routine.
But you know, she does address that in the book.
She addresses the way people react to her Instagram, because
there's also a lot of nudity in her Instagram and
her children have complained about that or I don't know
if it's her children or Kevin Federline or whatever, but
it has been said that her children don't like that,
and it's very provocative at times.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
At some point she got a.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Stripper pole, and I think people don't really know how
to respond to it, and she says something about it.
She says, I know that a lot of people don't
understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or
new dresses. But I think if they'd been photographed by
other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for people's approval,
they'd understand that I get a lot of joy from
(42:06):
posing the way I feel sexy in taking my own picture,
which I don't. Does that totally make sense? I don't
know why it didn't totally make sense to me?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Is an?
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I mean, I think because there are hints of a
ghostwriter or an editor saying the thing that they know
needs to be said to justify the behavior in a
way that's palatable to the reader.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, Like I was confused by that.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I don't know. I mean, it doesn't I guess it
doesn't have to make sense, but I don't. I mean,
the thing that makes me so uncomfortable about Brittany in
a lot of ways is that everyone thinks they know, yeah,
and nobody really fucking knows. The fans don't know. The
(42:51):
free Brittany people don't know. I mean, maybe the ghostwriter knows.
But the ghost writer has an agenda to make the
book palatable and make it so that there's not legal
issues and make it so that she's not getting criticized
for X y and Z and you know, being the
right amount of me. And when she calls Jamie Lynn
her little sister, a real bitch. Yeah, but also like
(43:13):
kind of making up word in the end. So it
still is like everyone has an agenda, I mean everyone.
It's like the critics have an agenda, the publicists have
an agenda, the ghost writer has an agenda, the book
editor has an agenda. So it is hard to tell.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean even some of the fans, right, Like even
some of the fans, like some of the Free Brittany
movement was attention for fans and gave them sort of
purpose and meaning, and so some of them haven't been
able to let it go.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Like there's also think they know best for her for
her Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
And it's tough too, because the Free Brittany movement was right,
like they did actually draw attention. She writes about it
in the book, to the fact that she was trapped
in this thing, and she actually thanks them in the
book for that. But by the same token, there seems
to be this sense that everyone knows what's best for
(44:09):
Britney Spears. And I don't know that any of us
know what's best for Britney Spears.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
I think that's right, and actually this is a good
place to end it because there was a quote from
the book I pulled which I felt like to me
was the essence of the book.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
So I will read it and we can end on that.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Note great, which is on page two forty eight, she says,
I guess what I'm saying is that the mystery of
who the real me is is to my advantage because
nobody knows.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's sort of that's funny, that's weird. I read it.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
You've read this whole book and you still don't know
about me.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
That is a good place to end it. I mean, yeah,
the reality is we don't know, but we will all
still keep talking about it.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
This is in retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Is there a cultural moment you can't stop thinking about
and want us to explore in a future episode. Email
us at inretropod at gmail dot com, or find us
on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at susib NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist
Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media.
Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and
associate producer.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Our artwork is from Pentagram.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Additional editing help from Mary Doo and Mike Cosparelli. Sound
correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your
hosts Susie Bannecarum.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
And Jessica Bennett. We're also executive producers for even more
check out inretropod dot com. See you next week.
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