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The memoir Britney Spears‘ fans have been waiting for, The Woman in Me, will be released on Oct. 24, but excerpts released in People give a comprehensive look at her last two heartbreaking decades. Her life in the spotlight as a child and teen star became more complicated behind the scenes as the media and her father, Jamie Spears, became more critical of her mere existence.
In 2008, when her mental health issues reached a crisis point, Britney admitted in the excerpt, “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.” She had been “eyeballed so much growing up” with “people telling [her] what they thought of [her] body.” While the negativity “hurt” when it was delivered from strangers, the now-41-year-old pop star revealed that Jamie also chose to cut her down with his words. “If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father,” she wrote. “He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”
The result is absolutely harrowing because her “passion” for performing was no longer there. “I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” she continued in the memoir, “Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”
After her breakdown, Britney was placed in a 13-year conservatorship that she says turned her into a “child-robot.” She explained, “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.”
Britney believes to this day that if Jamie, her family, and the other adults had let her “live [her] life” things would have turned out differently for her. Instead she felt like “a shadow” of herself for over a decade. “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,” she concluded, “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”
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