by Britney Spears ★★★☆☆
Considering she's been glaringly in the public eye for the last 25 years, I actually didn't know too much about Britney Spears prior to picking up The Woman In Me. I knew she'd gotten her start on The Mickey Mouse Club; I knew about the romances with Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline; I remembered some of the memorable award show performances, like when she performed I'm A Slave 4 U with a yellow python or did a duet of The Way You Make Me Feel with Michael Jackson; I knew about her Vegas residency, and a little about her conservatorship, and that it was overturned this year. Shit, never mind -- I knew quite a bit about Britney!
And that, I think, was the challenge with this memoir. How do you write your life story when so much of your life has been very publicly chronicled already? The only solution, in my opinion, is that you have to go deep. What I hoped to get out of the book was a bunch that I didn't know: what happened behind the scenes, what did it feel like, what are the stories the public didn't see. There is some of that, but it's in short supply, especially during the early years and the height of her career.
Britney starts from the start and talks about growing up poor in an abusive household. She glosses over the early years, and in a lot of ways glosses over a lot of her early career. She mentions the highly public moments that I did above, but doesn't devote more than a page to most of them (outside of her relationships). She also seemingly writes from a position of "this is a thing that happened, but everybody knows about it", so doesn't include dates or a ton of details that weren't already public knowledge. Unfortunately, she doesn't include much that wasn't public knowledge.
There are a few headline-grabbing reveals, but of course, most (and maybe all) of those turned into...you guessed it, headlines!...when the memoir was released, and so few came as a surprise. The memoir does get stronger in the second half, where Britney digs into the series of events that led to her eventually being placed into the conservatorship. There is depth and believability around her explanation for why she started acting "crazy" around the time she shaved her head, and you can see how in hindsight she knows she should have been doing some things differently, but at the same time she wasn't as "crazy" as she was portrayed. Her details of the conservatorship and the thirteen years she spent with every aspect of her life controlled and monitored are heartbreaking, and while it's only one side of the story, Britney's account rings quite true.
I didn't approach a Britney Spears' autobiography expecting a literary masterpiece; I did expect to get a fuller glimpse into what I assumed would be a fascinating life chock full of memorable stories. Instead, much of the public moments I think could have been written by...well, the public. She's not a tremendous storyteller, and as memoirs go, this one is just okay.