First excerpts from Britney Spears’ book
The star reveals his brutal truths
Britney Spears was under her father’s guardianship for 13 long years.
© imago images/Future Image
In the first excerpts from Britney Spears’ tell-all book “The Woman in Me,” the singer draws a devastating conclusion about her family.
It will be a while before Britney Spears’ (41) autobiography “The Woman in Me” officially goes on sale – it will be on October 24th. However, the US site “People” was already able to get a first glimpse of the tell-all book and talk to Spears about her work. The singer promises insights into her deepest private and emotional life: “It’s finally time for me to raise my voice and speak – my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracies, no lies more – just me, appropriating my past, present and future.”
The hard-working child star
In a passage from her book, Spears describes how she came into the spotlight as a child star of The Mickey Mouse Club when she was just 11 years old. She describes the children’s show as a “boot camp for the entertainment industry” and reveals an ambivalent view of it: On the one hand, it was “every child’s dream”. On the other hand, “it was extremely hard work: we repeated choreographies up to 30 times and tried to do every single step perfectly.”
Even after her time in the Mickey Mouse Club, where she was allowed to kiss a certain Justin Timberlake (42) during a game of “Truth or Dare,” Spears struggled with her career path: “There was already a conflict in me: a part of me wanted to move up “Work towards the dream. The other part wanted me to live a normal life in Louisiana.”
But said “normal life” didn’t seem possible anyway, as she explains with regard to cocktail trips with her mother: “From the time I was in eighth grade, my mother and I went on trips for fun […] to Biloxi, Mississippi, and while we were there we drank daiquiris. […] I loved being able to have a drink with my mom every now and then. The way we drank couldn’t compare to the way my father did. When he drank, he became more depressed and withdrawn. We became happier, more alive and more adventurous.”
Back to the full-time job
At the age of 15, she finally returned to show business and Spears signed her first record deal. The teenager had to work hard again, but according to her own statement, she was now the driving force behind it: “My work ethic was very strong. Anyone who knew me back then didn’t hear from me for days. I stayed in the studio as long as I could If someone wanted to leave, I said, ‘I wasn’t perfect yet.'”
Spears also looks back on her acting career and admits that this form of performance was not for her. The coming-of-age film “Crossroads,” released in 2002, was “the beginning and the end of my acting career [gewesen] – and I was relieved about that. When it came to casting for ‘Like a Single Day’, it was just me and Rachel McAdams. And while it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time together on The Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t.”
The world famous bald head
In one of the excerpts, Spears also talks about one of her most famous actions: when she shaved her head bald in front of the cameras. “Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been looked at up and down and people have told me what they thought of my body. Shaving my head and acting out was my way of fighting back.”
It was precisely this form of protest that was robbed by guardianship. So she had to grow her hair back and “get back in shape. I had to go to bed early and take all the medication I was prescribed. When I thought it was bad, being criticized in the press about my body “I was hurt even more by my own father. He kept telling me that I looked fat and that I needed to do something about it.”
Her father in particular loses his fat in this passage. He had repeatedly told her, from her youngest days onwards, that she was “not good enough”. “I became a robot. But not only that – I was a kind of child robot. I was so infantilized that I lost parts that made me feel like myself.” Her shocking conclusion about the 13 years without her own will: “Guardianship robbed me of my femininity and turned me into a child.” And: “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”