The Woman in Me
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4.3 • 358 Ratings
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.
Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pop star Spears recounts her rise to superstardom and the suffering she endured during her 13-year conservatorship in this chatty and sometimes searing debut memoir. The time frame spans from Spears's childhood in Louisiana in the 1980s to the final stages of the "Free Britney" movement in 2021, with stops in Vegas and at the VMAs in between, and the focus remains squarely on Spears's lack of control—over her fraying family of origin, her public image, and eventually, her own life. Key revelations include the at-home abortion Spears underwent at the urging of then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, the casual drinking she engaged in with her mother as a young teen (even as her father was gripped by alcoholism), and the sordid details of the rehab stints she endured at the behest of her father, who insisted she wasn't mentally well enough to drink coffee or drive a car even as he profited from the Las Vegas residencies he signed her up for. There's plenty of standard-issue celeb memoir name dropping—meetings with Madonna, parties with Lenny Kravitz—but the prevailing tone is more shell-shocked than glamorous. Spears recalls hiding in cupboards when she felt overwhelmed as a child and a debilitating bout of social anxiety at the height of her career, coming across more often as a fun-loving lost lamb than a remote cultural titan. The result is affecting, infuriating, and easy to gulp down in a single sitting.
Customer Reviews
Great Read
Britney. Yay!
Loved hearing her side of things
Helped me to understand what she was going through and why she does what she does.
Definitely enjoyed it
A Pop Superstar Does Not an Author Make
Don’t get me wrong #FreeBritney, I’m so happy that Britney is free to live her life the way she wants and deserves, and was frankly free to write this memoir. But my god is it lazily written. At times you’re able to overlook it and just read it for what it is, accepting that a sweet southern pop superstar is telling their story, but she isn’t a Rhodes Scholar. I don’t mean to say that she is stupid, it just reads in ultimately too many places like a string of consciousness just pouring out of her, and was later dictated. In describing her life prior to the conservatorship there is at least a sense of progress, of moving forward in a timeline you may or may not be familiar with, it’s easy to follow and a quick basic read. Once she starts to describe her life under the control of her father, things become repetitive and frankly whiney. I’m not without sympathy, I understand how horrible it is for her, and she’s just trying to describe that anguish to her readers. Obviously her life was spiraling and desperate. But opening no less than six chapters in a row by describing the meaninglessness of her life and depressed she is without any real progression of time or events, was just foul. Basically it was a fairly crappy read, uneventful, unshocking, and it begged for a ghost writer, or at least a decent editor. I’m all for wanting to read it in her own voice, but when your sentences are poorly pulled together and your paragraphs are lazy, it just reads childish. Otherwise, nothing here we didn’t know.