4 Takeaways From the Britney Spears Memoir, The Woman In Me

(I know you’re dying to know what I think!)

Photo credit: Dan Wayman via Unsplash / Britney Spears / Adryan Corcione

I finished reading The Woman In Me, so you didn’t have to! Just kidding, you should totally read it for yourself. I promise it’s worth it. While there are some mild spoilers below, this list isn’t a comprehensive summary of the book. Instead, it includes some selected highlights that stuck out to me personally as a mega fan.

If you haven’t yet read the book, I encourage you to! If you’re not much of a reader, I recommend this video from one of my favorite pop culture YouTubers, vitaly (ur y2k ceo). There’s also an audiobook version, although it unfortunately isn’t narrated by Britney herself.

Without further due, here are my key takeaways from Britney Spears’s new memoir.

1.   She was terrified of that python.

My eight-year-old jaw dropped when I saw Britney carrying a python as she performed “Slave 4 U” at the 2001 VMAs. Is that real?! I asked myself. I was scared for her!

It turns out she was also terrified of the python. Before the VMA rehearsal, she held the snake for the first time in a back room of the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. When she was first handed the python, she couldn’t believe her (and a backup dancer) were soon expected to handle the animal on stage, on live television, while dancing and singing:

“…all I knew was to look down, because I felt if I looked up and caught [the snake’s] eye, it would kill me. In my head I was saying, Just perform, just use your legs and perform. But what nobody knows is that I was singing, the snake brought me its head right around to my face, right up to me, and it started hissing. You didn’t see that shot on the TV, but in real life? I was thinking, Are you fucking serious right now? The fucking goddamn snake’s tongue is flicking out at me. Right. Now.”

2.   She liked that Justin Timberlake revealed their sexual relationship.

Britney and Justin Timberlake had an explosive, extremely public breakup in September 2002. It was rumored that Britney cheated on Justin, which caused the split. However, the two were still together when Justin made his debut record, Justified. Mind you, the first video for this record was “Cry Me a River”, in which, in Britney’s words, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and [Justin] wanders around all sad in the rain.”

Britney was slandered in the media and her personal life for her then-alleged, now-confirmed infidelity to Justin. The bigger memory from this era wasn’t her tabloid antagonization, but when Justin bragged about having sex with her during their three-year relationship. While being interviewed on a radio show, Justin was asked, “Did you fuck Britney Spears?”

"I did it," Timberlake said. "I'm dirty. I'm in so much damn trouble, man. I'm going to get calls from my mother!" He then laughed.

For years, I felt disgusted thinking about how Justin pompously disclosed his sexual relationship with Britney to the public. However, it turns out, that Britney actually liked that he did:

“Given that I had so many teenage fans, my managers and press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin—never mind that Justin and I had been living together, and I’d been having sex since I was fourteen. Was I mad at being ‘outed’ by him as sexually active? To be honest with you, I liked that Justin said that. Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my twenties? Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”

3.   Her on-stage kiss with Madonna wasn’t planned.

Following her break up with Justin, Britney found herself in a dark place. She describes hibernating in a four-story NoHo apartment that Cher used to live in. The idea to stay in a central location to explore Manhattan, but instead, she hardly ever left the apartment.

Madonna soon came to into her life and become her mentor as an elder pop star. “There were so many different ways to be a woman in the industry: you could get a reputation for being a diva, you could try to be a professional, or you could be ‘nice,’” she writes. Admittedly, Britney was a people-pleaser to everyone and being “too nice.” Howeverm Madonna—a seasoned professional and industry veteran—gave her a reality check and inspired Britney to step into her power.

This mentorship occurred around the time of yet another iconic VMA performance, when Britney and Madonna kissed during “Like a Virgin” in 2003. During rehearsals, the kiss was only supposed to be an air kiss. The actual on-stage kiss was a sudden, split-second decision. Knowing Britney’s history as a people-pleaser, I imagine this kiss represented much more than a publicity stunt. To her, it was a middle finger to the “good girl” image her team marketed her as.

4. She can breathe now.

In the final chapters of the book, Britney reflects on reckoning with her very public, traumatic past. Friends, both IRL and online, have asked me my take whether the book is a true testimony or yet another cash grab for Britney’s conservatorship team. I’ll never know how Britney feels, just like how I never knew she was terrified of that python or happy that Justin Timberlake dispelled her previous image as a virgin. I do feel in my soul, however, that Britney can finally breathe:

“That’s the kind of thing I’m doing now—trying to have fun and 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. Every day, I put music on. When I walk around my house singing, I feel completely free, completely at ease, completely happy. Whether I sound perfect or not, I don’t even care. Singing makes me feel confident and strong the same way exercise does, or prayer. (Remember: your tongue is your sword.) Anything that gets your heart rate up is good. Music is that, plus a connection to God. That’s where my heart is.”

Her father, Jamie Spears, wouldn’t approve of the book if he had a say, nor would her sister, Jamie Lynn, or her mother, Lynn. Britney and her publishing team didn’t hold back in the final draft of the book. Given the raw prose on the page, I can only wonder what was cut.