Today is the day, my friends: Britney Spears‘ memoir The Woman In Me is finally available to the public. As a result, the juiciest, most enthralling details from these express copies have found their way into the spotlight and are causing a ruckus.
Before the book even came out, Britney did an interview and shared an excerpt of the highly-anticipated release to PEOPLE. During the chat, Britney explained that sharing her side of the story has been her dream for a long, long, time.
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,” she said.
“After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life.”
So, without further ado, let’s look at the biggest revelations from her book so far.
Britney hated her 2004 tour
In 2004 Britney went on the Onyx Hotel Tour. For years fans have regarded the tour as one of her best shows of all time but in her memoir, she revealed that she fkn hated it.
“It was too sexual, for a start,” she wrote.
“Justin had embarrassed me publicly, so my rebuttal onstage was to kind of go there a little bit, too.
But it was absolutely horrible… In fact, I hated that entire stupid tour—so much that I prayed every night. I said, ‘God, just make my arm break. Make my leg break. Can you make something break?’”
The poor thing.
She felt betrayed by Jamie Lynn Spears
In 2018, 10 years into her conservatorship, Britney claimed that she was put into a mental health facility against her will. She said that she texted her little sister Jamie Lynn Spears for help. But instead of being empathetic, Britney said her sister told her to just accept it.
“Stop fighting it… There’s nothing you can do about it, so stop fighting it,” Jamie Lynn allegedly responded, per The Woman In Me.
“This will sound crazy, but I’ll say it again because it’s the truth: I thought they were going to try to kill me. I didn’t understand how Jamie Lynn and our father had developed such a good relationship.
“She knew I was reaching out to her for help and that she was dogging me. I felt like she should have taken my side.”
Britney revealed her party drug of choice
Some celebs are cocaine people, and others love a cheeky disco biscuit. But for Britney, she was a fiend for the ADHD medication Adderall.
Despite the press going absolutely rabid when she was spotted out on the town with ’90s party gals Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Britney said she never partied as hard as people thought. While she said she never had an interest in hard drugs or had an issue with alcohol, she popped ADHD meds on the reg.
“It made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed,” she said, per Page Six.
What did Britney have to say about her ex-husband Sam Asghari?
Britney and her husband of one year Sam Asghari are now divorced but when she wrote The Woman In Me, they were still together. And at the end of the memoir, she only had good things to say about him.
“I have an appreciation for how stable he is. I love that he doesn’t drink,” she wrote.
She also explained how she was captivated by him the moment they met in October 2016.
“I knew I wanted him in my life immediately,” she said
“The chemistry with us in the beginning was insane. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
Why Britney Spears shaved her head
Britney’s head-shaving incident of 2007 will forever be immortalised within pop culture lore. Not just because it was a moment of rebellion captured on camera by hoards of paparazzi, but because of the awful, heart-shattering way it was reported on at the time.
In an excerpt from The Woman In Me published by PEOPLE, Britney revealed that shaving her head was her way of fighting back against the people trying to control her during a time when she was deeply unhappy.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” Britney wrote.
“Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship, I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.
“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.
“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”
The conservatorship made her feel like ‘a robot’
After Britney’s father Jamie Spears put her in a conservatorship, which meant he had legal control over her medical, financial and even personal decisions, she said she felt like a failure.
“Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me,” she wrote.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
She went on, explaining how it made her feel like a shadow of herself and highlighted how much she managed to achieve whilst her family and the courts deemed her as “supposedly incapable of taking care of herself”.
“I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.
“Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”
Britney says she had an abortion after falling pregnant by Justin Timberlake
Britney has finally spoken about a painful piece of her history that she’s kept a secret for over 20 years. She claims that she had an abortion after becoming pregnant with Justin Timberlake‘s baby when she was 18 or 19 years old in 2000.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day,” she wrote, per PEOPLE.
“This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
“I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I don’t know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father,” she said, adding that it was “one of the most agonising things” she’s ever experienced.
Justin Timberlake’s camp did not respond to PEOPLE‘s request for a comment. However, on Tuesday reports came out claiming that Justin was “concerned” about what the memoir would include.
A source told Page Six that it was “eating at him”.
“Justin was very curious what she’ll reveal from their relationship,” the insider claimed. However, reps for Britney told the news site that the book is “not a takedown” of anyone.
And just in case anyone needs a refresher, after Britney and Justin broke up in 2002, Justin took control of the narrative. Not only did he claim to be a heartbroken ex to the press, but he also wrote some heavy break-up songs about her. Hell, he even used a Britney lookalike in his “Cry Me A River” video.
To use his own lyrics, what goes around comes around, hey Justin?
She was body-shamed constantly
As a pop star in the ’90s, Britney was under a huge amount of pressure to be thin. Throughout her years in the spotlight, she copped a lot of fatphobic rhetoric. But the “Toxic” singer says the worst critiques she got came from her own father Jamie.
“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father,” she said.
“He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”
If you take away one fact from the memoir, it should be that her father treated her horribly and I personally think he’s an ass.
The snake almost bit her during her iconic VMA performance in 2001
The cultural impact of Britney performing at the 2001 VMA Awards with a yellow albino python is still felt today. And while Britney, the consummate professional, nailed the show and looked like a queen while doing it, apparently she was terrified and worried the snake was going to attack her.
“The plan was for me to sing ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’, and we decided I would use a snake as a prop. It’s become an iconic moment in VMAs history, but it was even more terrifying than it appeared,” she explained in the memoir, per PEOPLE.
“All I knew was to look down, because I felt if I looked up and caught its eye, it would kill me.
“In my head I was saying, Just perform, just use your legs and perform. But what nobody knows is that as I was singing, the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing.
I was thinking, ‘Are you fucking serious right now? The fucking goddamn snake’s tongue is flicking out at me. Right. Now.’ Finally, I got to the part where I handed it back, thank God.”
Woah, there you have it.
You can buy Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me HERE.
