Throughout her 25-year career, Britney Spears’s age has somehow always seemed wrong. Seemed out of step with the persona she presented to the world. Her 2000 smash hit “Oops! … I Did It Again” found her sorry-not-sorrying for committing repeated romantic transgressions, sounding like a careless, jaded woman at the ripe old age of 18.
The months after the births of her two sons, in 2005 and 2006 — which Spears now says were characterized by “just about every symptom” of perinatal depression — also resulted in what she describes as a Benjamin Button effect. “I aged backward. Honestly, as a new mother, it was as if some part of me became the baby. One part of me was a very demanding grown woman ... while another part of me was suddenly very childlike.
To read the rest of “The Woman in Me” is to be saddened time and time again by the ways Spears has felt hurt, blindsided even, by the opportunism of others. She writes that she knew Timberlake slept with other women during their relationship but turned a blind eye — and even had an abortion she didn’t want — to keep him around. After Timberlake then dumped her via text message, Spears writes, he went on to write “Cry Me a River” about having been cheated on. “Everyone felt very sorry for him.
Post-divorce, Spears writes, she even wound up inadvertently participating in an extramarital affair with a photographer she dated. “I didn’t know then that the photographer was married,” she writes. “I only foundAs Spears’s timeline rolls into the years she was under her father’s guardianship, her tone changes from reflective to insistent.
The profanity kicks up many notches, and several passages of the last half of the book, when her ire turns toward her family, seem to share the same breathless, distraught tone as her statement to the Los Angeles Superior Court in 2021.— her father’s near-total control of her finances and daily life, the ever-present surveillance to which Spears was subjected — are well-known by now.