Britney Spears has won a Grammy and countless other awards. She’s sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

In 2021, Time magazine named her one of their 100 Most Influential People.

But the pop star went through a period where she had little control over her career, finances and even what she could eat under a restrictive conservatorship.

Her memoir The Woman in Me is out and it’s being billed as Spears “telling her own story, on her own terms, at last”.

Here are five takeaways.

1. The music

It’s always been about so much more than Spears’s music. But that’s the reason she’s in the public eye, so let’s start there.

Spears writes about taking control as a 16-year-old and changing the direction of what would become an iconic music video.

It was her idea to wear a school uniform while dancing around to … Baby One More Time.

“The mock-up I saw had me looking like a Power Ranger,” she writes of the original concept in which she would play a “futuristic astronaut”.

Spears also talks about what it was like to hold a snake while performing on stage at the 2001 MTV Awards.

She writes about feeling alive when she’s on stage.

“Singing takes me to a mystical place where language doesn’t matter anymore, where anything is possible,” Spears writes.

“Music stopped the noise, made me feel confident, and took me to a pure place of expressing myself exactly as I wanted to be seen and heard.”

But for many years Spears was forced to perform under duress.

2. The conservatorship

When Spears shaved her head in 2007, she did so in a defiant show of strength, she says, but that’s not how it was perceived in the media.

Instead, it was held up as proof of her mental instability.

A conservatorship would follow.

“I am Britney Spears now,” her father who was her conservator said to her, Spears writes. And for 13 years she had little agency.

What she ate was monitored. Who she was allowed to see was decided by others and yet despite being considered incapable of thinking for herself, she maintained a gruelling schedule as part of a four-year Las Vegas residency.

When Spears writes about being unable to sin in Sin City, it drives home just how baffling the terms of her conservatorship were.

Loading…

3. Her family

Spears documents that during her childhood, her father self-medicated with alcohol after enduring years of abuse at the hands of his own father.

She describes her father as being “reckless, cold, and mean” in the way he treated her but says he was even harder on her brother Bryan.

Spears writes about her parents being very poor, until she was able to provide for them.

Her mother and sister have both published books, which Spears dismisses as attempts to profit off her. (Spears has also previously published a book co-written with her mother Lynne.)

She no longer speaks to her family.

Spears has dedicated The Woman in Me to her two sons, who she had with Kevin Federline. She doesn’t paint a flattering picture of Federline who she says kept her from her children.

But it’s what she says about her former boyfriend Justin Timberlake that’s making headlines.

4. Justin Timberlake

There was a time when the two fronted the cameras united in double denim. But there was plenty happening behind the scenes.

Spears writes of an abortion, saying if it had been left to her alone, she would never have done it “and yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father”.

She says Timberlake was the beneficiary of the double standard that applies to female artists, who aren’t afforded the freedom that male artists are.

He dumped her via text, she says, amid cheating rumours, despite also cheating on her.

5. Sexuality

Spears rightly points out that her sexuality was no-one else’s business, but she faced invasive questions from journalists about her virginity as a teenager, saying she was treated as dangerous for wearing crop tops, while being the subject of a “Lolita fantasy” for some.

Spears refused to reveal publicly what she documents in the book – that she had been sexually active since she was 14 years old.

What’s next?

The book was put to bed before her break up with model Sam Asghari, with whom she had suffered a miscarriage.

Spears, who has been free from her conservatorship since 2021, sums up the story by thanking the fans who cared about her wellbeing.

She hasn’t teased any new music, but for now is relishing her freedom.

“Freedom means being goofy, silly, and having fun on social media,” Spears writes.

The Woman in Me is published by Simon & Schuster and is available in print and as an audiobook read by actor Michelle Williams, with an introduction by Britney Spears