Simon Schuster: 2023
I’m a decade older than Britney. When she became a pop phenomenon aged 16, I was into The Cure, U2, The Smiths, Bruce Springsteen, Motown, and I looked down on the Princess of Pop. Over time I’ve become less of a snob and I respect her success. More recently there has been the public drama surrounding her mental health troubles and the “Free Britney” campaign by her fans to release her from the legal restrictions of her conservatorship. I was therefore very interested to read her autobiography.
After the first couple of chapters this book was an addictive read, because Britney’s life and struggles were so exceptional. Her editors could perhaps have helped her more because, although there are specific dates given in the book, there are quite a lot of times where Britney writes “one day…”, where, with a bit of research it would have been possible to find out at least what year this event took place.
Britney writes that she had a difficult childhood largely due an alcoholic father. Singing, dancing and performing were her love and escape. After years of training – she had been performing since the age of 3 – she hit the big time aged 16 with “Baby One More Time” accompanied by a glossy teen aspirational dance video. However, from the outset of her success, she was troubled that the adulation always came mixed with criticism:
“They said I was dressing “too sexy,” and thereby setting a bad example for kids… it was my first real taste of a backlash that would last years. I felt like every time I turned on an entertainment show, yet another person would be taking shots at me, saying I wasn’t “authentic.”
I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing – a Bob Dylan impression? I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute” Pages 60-61.
Britney searched in different places to try and make sense of it all and find ways to cope:
Trying to find ways to protect my heart from criticism and to keep the focus on what was important, I started reading religious books like the Conversations with God series by Neale Donald Walsh. I also started taking Prozac.” Pages 60-61.
“I still imagined that if I was suffering, I must have deserved it. Along the line, surely I had done bad things. I believe in karma, and so when bad things happen, I imagine it’s just the law of karma catching up with me.” Page 89.
“Madonna’s supreme confidence helped me see a lot about my situation with fresh eyes. […] I was confused about my life. She tried to help me. At one point, she did a red-string ceremony with me to initiate me into Kabbalah, and she gave me a trunk full of Zohar books to pray with.” Page 98
A small minority of pop stars, like Sir Cliff Richard, are Christians with a firm grounding and clear direction. A much larger number try drugs, trendy new age religions and multiple relationships. It’s not easy to find the right course in life and, as St Paul writes, “when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” (Romans 7:21).
Britney has not been fortunate in her relationships. She writes of being pressured into undergoing an abortion. A common argument is that abortion must be kept legal because of “a woman’s right to choose”. But for Britney, she wasn’t really given the choice to have the baby:
“when we were dating, I became pregnant with Justin’s baby. 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. This would be much earlier than I’d anticipated. Besides, what was done was done.
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 could understand. I mean, I kind of understood. If he didn’t want to become a father, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I wouldn’t want to push him into something he didn’t want. Our relationship was too important to me. And so I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed to not have the baby.” Pages 75-76.
All the usual problems of life for a young woman were made more difficult by her fame. In addition to not being able to step outside without being surrounded by photographers, there was the pressure from her music managers to constantly tour and to bare her soul in interviews.
“I got a call from my team that I was going to speak to Diane Sawyer … I was too vulnerable then, too sensitive, to do this type of interview. … I didn’t want to share anything private with the world. I didn’t owe the media details of my breakup. I shouldn’t have been forced to speak on national TV, forced to cry in front of this stranger” Pages 104-5.
Later, Britney married Kevin Federline and they had two children. But Kevin apparently lost interest in Britney, and was involved with touring and drug taking with his band, and refused to see her when she visited. Britney’s mental health suffered:
“I knew then that I’d become weird… there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now…. I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. … With Kevin away so much, no one was around to see me spiral – except every paparazzo in America.” Pages 129 and 131.
Britney admits to going a bit wild, but that this was exaggerated by the Press – the paparazzi would chase and goad her till she reacted with anger and then they photographed and filmed her angry outburst. It may be that Britney’s mental health was worse than she portrays or realised, but she says that conservatorship that her father applied to the court over her was really due to financial motives. She writes that her father had recently been declared bankrupt and wanted to control her money:
“Conservatorships, also called guardianships, are usually reserved for people with no mental capacity, people who can’t do anything for themselves. But I was highly functional. I was making people a lot of money, especially my father, who I found out took a bigger salary than he paid me…
My dad was able to set up two forms of conservatorship: what is called “conservatorship of the person” and “conservatorship of the estate.” The conservator of the person is designated to control details of the conservatee’s life, like where they live, what they eat, whether they can drive a car, and what they do day-to-day. Even though I begged the court to appoint literally anyone else – and I mean, anyone off the street would have been better – my father was given the job… The conservator of the estate… manages the conservatee’s affairs to keep them from being “subject to undue influence or fraud.” This role was taken by my father in conjunction with a lawyer named Andrew Wallet, who would eventually be paid $426,000 a year for keeping me from my own money. I was forced to pay upward of $500,000 a year to my court-appointed lawyer, who I wasn’t allowed to replace.” Page 166-7.
“The conservatorship was created supposedly because I was incapable of doing anything at all – feeding myself, spending my own money, being a mother, anything. So why was it that a few weeks later, they had me shoot an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then sent me on a gruelling world tour?…
I remained shocked that the state of California would let a man like my father – an alcoholic, someone who’d declared bankruptcy, who’d failed in business, who’d terrified me as a little girl – control me…
I kept my receipts in a bowl. Each week, I would add up my expenses old-school style to keep track of my deductions for taxes…
I knew musicians who did heroin, got in fistfights, and threw TVs out of hotel windows. Not only didn’t I steal anything or hurt anyone or do hard drugs – I was keeping track of my tax deductions.
Not anymore. My father shoved aside my bowl of receipts, setting up things on the bar. “I just want to let you know,” he said, “I call the shots.”… “I’m Britney Spears now,” he said.” Pages 173-5.
Britney writes that her father confiscated her mobile phone, dictated what food she ate and she was only allowed to see friends under controlled conditions. She felt that her court-appointed lawyer was not interested in fighting for her interests. She was told that she could not appoint her own lawyer and went through the conservatorship for thirteen years until she found out that this was not true. Before the conservatorship her ex-husband had refused her access to her two children, arguing she was unstable. Under the conservatorship she was allowed her children back, so she initially chose to not fight the conservatorship as a sacrifice for being with her children. Meanwhile, her father became a multi-millionaire from her touring, sales and tv appearances.
During her four years ‘residency’ performing in Las Vegas, she sang and danced as instructed but was not allowed the creative freedom to choose which songs to sing. The financial control also continued:
“I was given an allowance of about $2,000 dollars a week. If I wanted a pair of sneakers that my conservators didn’t think I needed, I would be told no. This was despite that fact that I did 248 shows and sold more than 900,000 tickets in Vegas. Each show paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the only nights that I went out with a friend and others, including my dancers, for dinner, I tried to pick up the check for the whole party. The check was a thousand dollars, because the group was so big, but I had wanted to take them out – it was important to me that they knew how much I appreciated how hard they worked. My purchase was declined. I didn’t have enough money in my “allowance” account to cover it.” Pages 201-2.
About four years into her residency at Las Vegas she said that some of her sense of self returned and she made small steps to try and assert some independence. In rehearsals she refused to do a particular dance move. The response, she says, was more medical intervention, to make her submissive once again:
“A day later in therapy, my doctor confronted me.
“We found energy supplements in your purse,” he said. The energy supplements gave me a sense of confidence and energy, and you didn’t need a prescription for them. He knew that I had been taking them during my shows in Vegas, but now he made a big deal out of it.
“We feel you’re doing way worse things behind our backs,” he said. “And we don’t feel like you’re doing well in rehearsals. You’re giving everyone a hard time.”…
“We’re going to be sending you to a facility,” the therapist said…
My father told me “…There’s something severely wrong with you. But don’t worry – we found you a small rehab program in Beverly Hills. It will only cost you sixty thousand dollars a month.”
My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed. He said, “We will make you look like a fucking idiot, and trust me, you will not win.” Page 228-230.
In the facility:
“The therapists questioned me for hours and what seemed like every day, seven days a week.
For years I’d been on Prozac, but in the hospital they took me abruptly off it and put me on lithium, a dangerous drug that I did not want or need and that makes you extremely slow and lethargic. …On lithium, I didn’t know where I was or even who I was sometimes. My brain wasn’t working the way it used to…
That time in the hospital took away my sassiness. In so many ways, it broke my spirit.” Pages 232-4.
However, in the darkest of times, God was still with her:
“God must have been with me through that period of time. Three months into my confinement, I started to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore. Something bigger must have been carrying me through, because it was too much for me to bear alone.
I look at the fact that I survived and I think, That wasn’t me; that was God.” Page 236.
When she was in the facility, the Free Britney movement started and she had her first signs of hope:
“Several weeks into my stay, I was struggling to say hopeful when one of the nurses, the only one who was real as hell, called me over to her computer.
“Look at this,” she said.
I peered at her computer and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. It was women on a talk show talking about me and the conservatorship. One was wearing a #FreeBritney T-shirt.” Pages 239-240.
After her release from the facility she summoned up the courage to try again to challenge the conservatorship. In June 2021 Britney had a telephone hearing with the Los Angeles probate court on the subject of the conservatorship. She spoke of her anger and her depression being the subject of such control and wanting to have the same rights as everyone else. She writes:
“Of all the things they did, I will say the worst was to make me question my faith. I never had strict ideas about religion. I just knew there was something bigger than me. Under their control, I stopped believing in God for a while. But then, when it came time to end the conservatorship, I realized one thing: You can’t fuck with a woman who knows how to pray. Really pray. All I did was pray.” Page 258.
She writes that her court appointed lawyer had shown no inclination to ‘fight’ for her over the last thirteen years to end her conservatorship. The lawyer would have been under an ethical duty to act in Britney’s best interests. There would have been a tension between this duty and the fact that it would have been in the lawyers personal financial interests for the conservatorship to continue. Whether the lawyer excluded their personal considerations from how they acted is not clear. However, when Britney found that she had been lied to and that she actually had the legal right to appoint her own lawyer, she appointed Mathew Rosengart, who within a few months had succeeded in having the conservatorship ended.
Since then:
“I’ve been trying to rebuild my life day by day. I’m trying to learn to take care of myself, and to have some fun, too …trying to be kind to myself, to take things at my own pace. And for the first time in a long time, allowing myself to trust again.” Pages 261-2.
“Freedom means being goofy, silly, and having fun on social media. Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911. Freedom means being able to make mistakes, and learning from them. Freedom means I don’t have to perform for anyone – onstage or offstage. Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else. And freedom means the ability, and the right, to search for joy, in my own way, on my own terms.” Page 274.
I wish Britney all the best for the future.
December 2023
Adrian Vincent