In 2002, Forbes named Britney Spears the most powerful celebrity in the world. Within a few years, this power was taken from her: she was under the legal control of her family, held for months against her will in a mental hospital, and deprived of all freedom, even to the point that she could eat and drink.
In my memories The woman in meCo-written with an unnamed co-writer, Spears fearlessly chronicles everything from her childhood in rural Louisiana and her early fame on The Mickey Mouse Club to global pop domination, exposing the brutal totalitarianism of the legal conservatorship she was under in the context of her private life. . published. and family history.
Amid stories of family chaos and unhealthy relationships, we see sign after sign that something is very wrong and no one is doing anything to stop Spears’ car from running off the road (both figuratively and literally, twice). Spears’ insightful interpretation of this is that almost everyone in her life saw her as a money machine rather than a person.
When she writes about the Las Vegas residency she completed under her father’s watch in 2013, she looks like little more than a dancing bear: exhausted, unsatisfied, chained to her master and locked in a cage.
“In order to even leave the premises, we had to warn security two hours in advance,” she writes, and the performance was not updated for the entire two-year period. “Singing old versions of old songs like that made my body feel old.”
It was a far cry from Britney Spears, who found strength in performing, reveling in the drama of the main show or simply getting the pure joy of using her voice while competing for attention at home.
Spears writes about singing as a way to access the divine, the joy of music that takes her “halfway from the world” during a financially and emotionally unstable childhood. The trickle-down effect of family trauma is presented almost as a matter of course: her father’s tragic childhood and its impact on his behavior as an adult in turn influenced Spears’ behavior, which was shaped by her father’s drinking and her mother’s despair. . Although her anger is obvious, Spears is rarely bitter and surprisingly understanding.
Spears was a bright and ambitious teenager, but the adult Spears seemed to have difficulty understanding her personality. Acting was a devastating experience for me: a role in the frothy teen drama of 2002. overlap, she was consumed by her figure and felt divided. “Living like this, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is a mess,” she writes. “After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
On stage, she wrestled with her doppelgänger, “which seemed like it was probably a metaphor for something,” she writes dismissively. Later, during a performance at one of her lowest points, she sees her own image reflected on the video screens and describes it as “like looking at yourself in a funny mirror.”
Equally unstable were her personal relationships, many of which seemed to end in a dramatic whirlwind. As a teenager, she had a long-term relationship with Justin Timblerlake. The great news that Spears reluctantly agreed to an at-home abortion made headlines when she became pregnant while dating Justin Timberlake.
This is a shocking chapter. She paints a vivid picture of a young woman sobbing in pain for hours on the bathroom floor while Timberlake plays guitar. Despite being generous about the fact that they were so young, Timberlake doesn’t come off very well from Spears’ story: he comes across as quite selfish, egotistical, and careless about her feelings for him.
Spears’ struggles circa 2007 are well documented, given the paparazzi surrounding her at the time. She vividly describes them as “enemy fighters,” “an army of zombies”; She felt like Pac Man, cornered by ghosts. Struggling with undiagnosed perinatal depression and the threat of losing her two sons in a messy custody battle, she shaved her head in a desperate attempt to maintain some control, expressed here in the rhythm of Britney Spears’ hit: “Shaving your head was a way of telling the world, ‘Fuck you.’ Do you want me to be beautiful for you? Damn it. Do you want me to be nice to you? Damn it. Do you want me to be the woman of your dreams? Damn it.
Her father, whom she feared and from whom she was essentially estranged, seized the opportunity to gain legal control of her property and her person. This led to 13 years of what Spears calls “Groundhog Day.”
From that moment on, horror after horror. She writes that she was betrayed by her family, her freedom and love of music were taken away, and she ended up in an isolated rehab center. She was given lithium, which distorted her sense of time and made her feel “alienated from her own body,” a body that, as she knew all too well, had been endlessly ogled, discussed and debated since childhood.
On the pages, it seems unreal to me that anyone could go through all this, let alone one of the most famous women in the world. The first spark of hope feels like a ray of sunshine breaking through a cloud as she describes how a nurse at a second facility showed her some photos of the #FreeBritney movement and the path to freedom began.
Sensational headlines about The woman in meSpears’ various revelations have done Spears a disservice. There are stories that have remained private until now, but they are told only for the sake of more important things: trauma begets trauma, creativity cannot flourish without freedom, and love should be given freely and without restrictions.
Sure, there are anecdotes and name drops, and the writing is light and conversational, like she’s revealing secrets in a classic Britney Instagram caption, but just thinking of it as a memoir by a famous person is an understatement: that’s the concept. disassembled “Mad Woman,” revealing the nature of celebrity and highlighting some serious flaws in the American legal system. The strength of this book is that it exists at all.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.