If you’re like us, you’ve found yourself singing the Britney Spears’ lyric “hit me baby, one more time” way more often than you’d like to admit. For all those shower serenades, however, we never expected Britney Spears to hit back. But that’s exactly what has happened now that the legendary singer is working on a tell-all memoir.
Typically, celebs don’t release much of the juicy stuff ahead of the memoir getting published because they want to drive sales up. However, Britney has always played by her own rules, and she’s released some major factoids from the book already. Some of what she has described is inspirational, but much of it (if we’re being honest) is just downright sad.
Got some tissue handy? Keep reading as we walk you through the saddest things we learned from Britney Spears’ memoir!
Her youth was defined by a Mickey Mouse ‘boot camp’
As you may remember, Britney Spears got her start in entertainment by appearing on the Mickey Mouse Club. Those of us who watched this show growing up often thought that entertaining millions of kids was the coolest possible job. However, Spears’ book does a good job of taking the shine off our childhood fantasy.
As reported by People, Spears compared getting ready to sing and dance with getting ready to go to war. “Being in the show was boot camp for the entertainment industry: extensive dance rehearsals, singing lessons, acting classes, time in the recording studio, and school in between.” She complained that she had to practice choreography “thirty times a day” and that most of her childhood was consumed by this grueling practice.
Underage drinking with her mom
When all the debate about Britney Spears’ conservatorship was popping off (more on this soon), the singer’s father became the subject of much ridicule and scorn. And while that controlling papa deserves much of that negativity, People reports an anecdote from Spears’ book that makes us look at her mother in a very negative light as well.
“For fun, starting when I was in eighth grade, my mom and I would make the two-hour drive from Kentwood to Biloxi, Mississippi, and while we were there, we would drink daiquiris,” Spears writes. “We called our cocktails ‘toddies.’” While the singer wistfully looks back on these as happier days with her mother (they would later have an epic falling out), this story of a mother deliberately getting her middle school-age child to drink alcohol is just downright depressing.
Britney Spears shaved her head to regain control of her life
For most of us, the first major hint that Britney Spears was struggling with some things behind the scenes occurred when she shaved her head. Back in 2007, she walked into a Tarzana, California salon and demanded they shave her head, and when the stylist refused, Spears took matters into her own hands. This left everyone else to ask why someone with such a famous head of hair would want to shave it all off.
As People reports, Spears wrote in her memoir that this was a way of taking control of her public image. “I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” she wrote. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.” In retrospect, it was definitely one of the most dramatic things she could do with her body and appearance!
She felt dehumanized by her conservatorship
Britney Spears’ conservatorship was removed in 2021, but the publicity surrounding this action helped highlight how weird and harmful that conservatorship was to begin with. That conservatorship gave her father, Jamie Spears, immense control over her life, and all of the decisions that would impact her life (from the major financial decisions to the deeply personal decisions) had to go through him first.
According to People, Britney resented this conservatorship on a fundamental level. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage,” she wrote. “I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
In case you were wondering, the memoir makes it clear that no love is lost between Britney and her father. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself,” she wrote. “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 had an abortion when dating Justin Timberlake
Once upon a time, the high-profile romance between Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake was the talk of the town. You might think there are no real surprises left, but according to People, the biggest bombshell in Spears’ memoir concerns her time with the singer.
According to Spears, she became pregnant with Timberlake’s baby and then had an abortion. Making matters worse, she felt pressured by him to do so. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she wrote. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Watch out, Justin. After this memoir hits, we don’t think anyone will cry you a river anytime soon!