Britney Spears said writing her memoir was “heart-wrenching and emotional” — and we can see why.
The first excerpts of the book, The Woman in Me, which is out on Oct. 24, appeared on People magazine’s website on Tuesday and talk about “Toxic.” The pop superstar, 41, shares a long-hidden, deeply personal secret from her relationship with Justin Timberlake, details the conservatorship that “stripped me of my womanhood” and recounts Spears family disfunction.
Here are the biggest revelations so far…
Britney claims she became pregnant with Justin’s baby and had an abortion.
The pair met as tween stars making The Mickey Mouse Club. They shared their first kiss, to a Janet Jackson song, while playing Truth or Dare during that era. Their real romance blossomed a few years later and they dated from 1999 to 2002, becoming one of the most talked-about couples of that time. During that time, Britney terminated an unexpected pregnancy.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” she wrote of getting pregnant. “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day.” However the Nsync singer “definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy.” He said they were too young and “didn’t want to be a father.” She had an abortion, but made it clear: “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it… To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Britney went on to have two sons — Preston, 18, and Jayden, 17 — with her second husband Kevin Federline, telling People, “Being a mom was my dream come true.” She’s in contact with the boys, who live with their dad in Hawaii, again after a period of estrangement. Timberlake — who went on to marry Jessica Biel and have two sons — didn’t comment for People’s story. A source close to the singer told Entertainment Tonight he’s focused on his own family and “trying not to concern himself with Britney’s memoir.”
The singer became a “robot” in the conservatorship.
After her split with Timberlake, Spears continued to look for love and stability, marrying twice and having her sons between 2004 and 2007. When her second marriage ended, she found herself especially under the media glare. She was hounded by paparazzi as she tried to find her footing as a single mom/global pop star. Her struggles were amplified in blogs and on magazine covers. Britney was put into the conservatorship in 2008 — under her father Jamie — and it remained in place for 13 years. The conservatorship ended in 2021 after Britney alleged conservator abuse.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot,” she wrote of the conservatorship. “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… It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
Conservatorships are reserved for the most vulnerable members of society, but she was working non-stop.
“The thing was: I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself,” she wrote. “I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family.”
In her opinion, if her family had “let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out.” Instead, “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself.”
She claims her father body-shamed her during the conservatorship.
“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,” she wrote. “Shaving my head [in 2007] 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.”
The headlines about her were nothing compared to the comments from her own dad.
“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,” she wrote, noting she was made to feel as if she was “never good enough” in her dad’s eyes since she was a child.
She added, “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.”
She started drinking alcohol with her mother when she was in 8th grade.
She and mom Lynne would go on road trips when Britney lived in Kentwood, La., and mother and daughter would “drink daiquiris” together while they were there, she wrote. “We called our cocktails ‘toddies.’ I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then. The way we drank was nothing like how my father did it. When he drank, he grew more depressed and shut down. We became happier, more alive and adventurous.”
Britney was almost cast in The Notebook
While Crossroads was a bust, she was still in contention to co-star opposite another Mickey Mouse Club alum, Ryan Gosling, in 2004’s The Notebook. The “casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams,” Spears wrote, “and even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan [again], I’m glad I didn’t do it.” Instead, she made her album In the Zone.
The Woman in Me comes out on Oct. 24. Expect many more stories from the book to come out between now and then.
