Highlights
The Woman in Me - Britney Spears (Highlight: 195; Note: 13)
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Prologue
▪ little girl
▪ my mother and father fought constantly
▪ He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home.
▪ my mother and father fought constantly
Chapter 1
▪ When I sing, I own who I am. I can communicate purely
▪ When I was alone with my thoughts, my mind filled with worries and fears. 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.
▪ Tragedy runs in my family. My middle name comes from my father’s mother
▪ Her husband—my grandfather June Spears Sr.—was abusive.
▪ In 1966, when she was thirty-one, my grandmother Jean shot herself with a shotgun on her infant son’s grave, just over eight years after his death
▪ I know that trauma is part of why my father was how he was with my siblings and me
▪ He drank until he couldn’t think anymore
▪ She was disappointed
▪ how empty his world seemed
▪ So my grandmother kept to herself
Chapter 2
▪ I’ve always assumed their secret ingredient for staying up all night was speed, since that was the drug of choice back then.
▪ My mother never missed an opportunity to recall that she was in excruciating labor with me for twenty-one hours
▪ Laura Lynne
▪ Lexie Pierce
▪ Lexie and I were very close. My most vivid and joyful memories of being a little girl are of times spent with her
▪ I didn’t understand how being with someone I loved could be considered dangerous.
▪ Hiding was one way I got attention
▪ I wanted to hide, but I also wanted to be seen. Both things could be true
Chapter 3
▪ It’s funny how one split second can change a family’s dynamics forever
▪ I wanted to bring him comfort.
Chapter 4
▪ When my father started drinking heavily again, his businesses started to fail.
▪ I knew even then that my father had reasons for wanting to lose himself in drinking
▪ Now I see even more clearly that he was self-medicating after enduring years of abuse at the hands of his father, June
▪ by day my mom made our home a place my friends wanted to come to—at least when my father respected us enough to drink somewhere else
▪ My mom was a typical young Southern mom, often gossiping, always smoking cigarettes with her friends at the bar
▪ I always had to fight to get the older kids’ attention
Chapter 5
▪ Christina Aguilera
▪ I had simpler dreams, too, dreams that seemed even harder to achieve and that felt too ambitious to say out loud: I want my dad to stop drinking. I want my mom to stop yelling.
Chapter 6
▪ Do you have a boyfriend?
▪ I kept it together until I made it backstage—but then I burst into tears.
▪ The other understudy was a talented young actress named Natalie Portman
▪ But it was a grueling schedule. There was no time to be a regular kid or really make friends, because I had to work nearly every day
▪ In my little-girl mind, I didn’t understand why I’d want to do that—continue performing through the holidays. So I quit the show and went home.
▪ The closeness that you feel with the people in the audience is something special. Their energy made me stronger.
▪ People would come from far away to see him play, just like they had to see my dad.
Chapter 7
▪ Being in the show was boot camp for the entertainment industry
▪ Ryan Gosling
▪ And quickly I connected with a boy named Justin Timberlake.
▪ Justin Timberlake
▪ Another time, at a sleepover, we played a game of Truth or Dare, and someone dared Justin to kiss me. A Janet Jackson song was playing in the background as he leaned in and kissed me.
▪ By thirteen, I was drinking with my mom and smoking with my friends.
▪ I wasn’t just drinking and smoking by that age; I was precocious when it came to boys
▪ So I put on my little-bitty heels and my cute little dress, and I returned to New York.
Chapter 8
▪ I was very girly at the time—always in a dress and heels.
▪ I stayed up late so that I’d go into the studio tired, my voice fried. It worked. When I sang, it came out gravelly in a way that sounded more mature and sexier
Chapter 9
▪ Making that video was the most fun part of doing that first album.
▪ There is so much freedom in being anonymous
▪ But by the end of September, the song was on the radio. I was sixteen when, on October 23, 1998, the “… Baby One More Time” single hit stores.
▪ On January 12, 1999, the album came out and sold over ten million copies very quickly
▪ the photos were controversial because the cover shot of me in my underwear holding a Teletubby played up how young I was
Chapter 10
▪ To me that’s what separated them from the Backstreet Boys, who seemed very consciously to position themselves as a white group.
▪ I couldn’t help but notice that the questions he got asked by talk show hosts were different from the ones they asked me. Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery
▪ Meanwhile, I was breaking records, becoming one of the best-selling female artists of all time
▪ while going from a suit and hat to a glittery bikini top and tight pants, my long hair down.
▪ Some of them said I did a good job, but an awful lot of them seemed to be focused on my having worn a skimpy outfit. They said that I was dressing “too sexy,” and thereby setting a bad example for kids.
▪ I was a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?
▪ Meanwhile, I started to notice more and more older men in the audience, and sometimes it would freak me out to see them leering at me like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy for them, especially when no one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot.
▪ Trying to find ways to protect my heart from criticism and to keep the focus on what was important, I started reading religious books like the Conversations with God series by Neale Donald Walsch. I also started taking Prozac.
Chapter 11
▪ I landed the “most powerful woman” spot on the Forbes list of most powerful celebrities—the following year I’d be number one overall.
▪ That was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved
▪ being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.
Chapter 12
▪ In my personal life, I was so happy. Justin and I lived together in Orlando. We shared a gorgeous, airy two-story house with a tile roof and a swimming pool out back
▪ There were a couple of times during our relationship when I knew Justin had cheated on me.
▪ So I did, too. Not a lot—one time, with Wade Robson. We were out one night and we went to a Spanish bar. We danced and danced. I made out with him that night.
▪ But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.
Chapter 13
▪ Ultimately, he ended our relationship by text message
Chapter 14
▪ When you’re successful at something, there’s a lot of pressure to keep right on doing it, even if you’re not enjoying it anymore
▪ Justin’s family had been the only real, loving family I had.
▪ Life in Louisiana had passed me by. I felt like I had no one to talk to.
Chapter 15
▪ That party was really the first thing I did to put myself out there a bit after the breakup with Justin—on my own,
▪ I’d made a bad mistake letting this stranger inside my car, and I kicked him out.
▪ he’d cheated on me?
There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women
▪ The hip-hop world of that era loved a storyline with the theme “Fuck you, bitch!”
▪ I don’t think Justin realized the power he had in shaming me. I don’t think he understands to this day.
▪ As a child, I’d always had a guilty conscience, a lot of shame, a sense that my family thought I was just plain bad.
▪ I can feel the energy of other people. I can’t help but take it in
▪ The poet Rumi says the wound is the place where the light enters you
▪ There have been so many times when I was scared to speak up because I was afraid somebody would think I was crazy
▪ You have to speak the thing that you’re feeling, even if it scares you
Chapter 16
▪ The way social anxiety works is that what feels like a totally normal conversation to most people, to you feels mortifying
▪ I was afraid of being judged or of saying something stupid
▪ Why was it so easy for everyone to forget that I was a human being—vulnerable enough that these headlines could leave a bruise?
▪ It would have been a dream apartment to use as a home base to explore the city, but I hardly ever left the place
▪ I fell off the face of the earth. I ate takeout for every meal. And this will probably sound strange, but I was content staying home. I liked it there. I felt safe.
▪ I took a couple hits from a joint, my first time smoking pot.
▪ I must have learned that helplessness from my mom
▪ If I could go back now, I would try to become my own parent, my own partner, my own advocate—the way I knew Madonna did
Chapter 17
▪ I had a dark cloud over my head; I was traumatized.
▪ d often retreated to my apartment to be alone; now I was being forced to speak to Diane Sawyer there and cry in front of the entire nation.
▪ That interview was a breaking point for me internally—a switch had been flipped
▪ I honestly feel like that moment in my life should have been a time for growing—and not sharing everything with the world.
▪ I realized: something about my being under their control and not having a stronger connection to someone else had become very, very important to them.
▪ I felt like I’d been missing out on life.
Chapter 18
▪ I lost track of my brother in those years. And so, in many ways, it felt as though I lost Justin and Bryan around the same time.
▪ Meanwhile, the press kept suggesting famous men who I should date—royalty, CEOs, models. How could I explain that I just wanted to be held for an hour by a man in a swimming pool?
▪ We want to feel safe and alive and sexy all at the same time.
▪ So when the doctors offered me Vicodin, I took it. I didn’t want to experience that level of pain again
▪ The music industry is just too hard-core and unforgiving
▪ It’s not possible to find stillness when you’re on the road.
▪ Kevin and I got married that fall
▪ Now that I was married and thinking about starting a family, I decided to start saying no to things that didn’t feel right—like the Onyx tour
▪ I’ve actually learned to say ‘NO!
▪ I’m sorry that my life seemed like it was all over the place the past two years. It’s probably because IT WAS
Chapter 19
▪ Two things about being pregnant: I loved sex and I loved food. Both of those things were absolutely amazing throughout both of my pregnancies.
▪ If I stayed out of the public eye, surely, eventually, I thought, the photographers would leave me alone
▪ Everything I did with the babies was chronicled
Chapter 20
▪ I could smell the weed wafting out of the studio door before I even walked in. He and the other guys would all be getting high, and it felt like I was in the way. I wasn’t invited to their party.
▪ You take turns letting each other be a little selfish
▪ In trying to make up all these excuses in my head, I was lying to myself—totally in denial this whole time that he was leaving me.
▪ But he wouldn’t see me. It seemed like he wanted to pretend I didn’t exist.
▪ “How are you doing?” he asked. He seemed to genuinely care how I answered.
When was the last time someone asked me that? I wondered.
Chapter 21
▪ On the other hand, I’d been so happy feeling these babies protected inside me. I got a little depressed once I was no longer keeping them safe inside my body
▪ Kids are so healing in one way. They make you less judgmental. Here they are, so innocent and so dependent on you
▪ I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors
▪ With Kevin away so much, no one was around to see me spiral—except every paparazzo in America
Chapter 22
▪ Unfortunately, when family life is bad, that takes over and makes anything good on the other side feel less good
Chapter 23
▪ Looking back, I think that both Justin and Kevin were very clever. They knew what they were doing, and I played right into it.
▪ That’s the thing about this industry. I never knew how to play the game
Chapter 24
▪ Do you want to know my drug of choice? The only thing I really did except for drinking? Adderall, the amphetamine that’s given to kids for ADHD. Adderall made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant, and I really felt like I needed one of those.
▪ And I’ve never even liked weed except for that one time in New York when I broke my heel
▪ My mom always made me feel like I was bad or guilty of something, even though I had worked so hard to be good. That’s what my family has always done—treated me like I was bad.
▪ my parents never seemed to think I was worth much. How could you treat your child like that when she was going through a divorce, when she was lonely and lost?
▪ But they still held so much emotional power over me
Chapter 25
▪ Everything everyone says about becoming a parent was true for me. My boys gave my life meaning.
▪ Justin and Kevin were able to have all the sex and smoke all the weed in the world and no one said one word to them
▪ As part of his bid for full custody, Kevin tried to convince everyone that I was completely out of control. He started to say I shouldn’t have my kids anymore—at all.
▪ On the inside, I’d felt a cloud of darkness for a long time. On the outside, though, I’d tried to keep looking the way people wanted me to, keep acting the way they wanted me to—sweet and pretty all the time.
▪ But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me.
▪ Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.
▪ My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children. That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God—taking naps with my precious babies, smelling their hair, holding their tiny hands.
▪ My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children. That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God—taking naps with my precious babies, smelling their hair, holding their tiny hands.
Chapter 26
▪ He wasn’t asking if he could. He was telling me what he was going to do to me
▪ There was so much ugliness in his voice—such a lack of humanity
▪ Later, that paparazzo would say in an interview for a documentary about me, “That was not a good night for her… But it was a good night for us—’cause we got the money shot.”
▪ It’s a vibe, he says—a choice not to play into ideas of conventional beauty
Chapter 27
▪ It was like my mom wouldn’t even look at me because I was ugly now
▪ I was so ashamed and embarrassed already, but here was my dad telling me I was a disgrace
▪ I was having a panic attack. I hadn’t rehearsed enough. I hated the way I looked. I knew it was going to be bad.
▪ Sarah Silverman
▪ She called my two babies “the most adorable mistakes you’ll ever see.”
Chapter 28
▪ I felt like no one had my back. Even my family seemed not to care
▪ Right around the holidays, I found out about my sixteen-year-old sister’s pregnancy from an exclusive in the tabloids
▪ I now see that if someone’s not doing well—and I was really not doing well—that’s the time you need to come to that person and hold them
Chapter 29
▪ Back then I would speak up if I didn’t like something—I would certainly let you know.
▪ I sensed that my family was trying to get closer to me—in a way that made me uneasy
▪ Conservatorships, also called guardianships, are usually reserved for people with no mental capacity, people who can’t do anything for themselves
▪ This role was taken by my father in conjunction with a lawyer named Andrew Wallet, who would eventually be paid $426,000 a year for keeping me from my own money.
▪ Soon after I was brought to the hospital against my will, I was informed that the conservatorship papers had been filed
Chapter 30
▪ People don’t know why I have such anger toward my parents. But I think if they were in my shoes, they would understand
Chapter 32
▪ If you’re asking why I went along with it, there’s one very good reason. I did it for my kids.
Because I played by the rules, I was reunited with my boys.
Chapter 33
▪ When Justin cheated on me and then acted sexy, it was seen as cute. But when I wore a sparkly bodysuit, I had Diane Sawyer making me cry on national television, MTV making me listen to people criticizing my costumes, and a governor’s wife saying she wanted to shoot me
▪ The thing was: I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself
▪ I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family.
The truth was, though, when I stopped to think about it for very long, it wasn’t funny at all.
Chapter 34
▪ When my father told me I couldn’t have dessert, I felt that it was not just him telling me but my family and my state, like I was not allowed legally to eat dessert, because he said no.
▪ This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom
Chapter 35
▪ To me, he seemed like marriage material: He took great care of himself. His family was close. I loved him.
Chapter 36
▪ But I was so good, I thought, reflecting on how hard I’d worked in those shows. I wasn’t good, I was great
Chapter 37
▪ But now I know why I’d been sleepwalking through so much of the past thirteen years. I was traumatized
▪ Toning down my energy onstage was my own version of a factory slowdown
▪ I wanted to be a woman in the world. Under the conservatorship, I wasn’t able to be a woman at all.
▪ my father even had a bug put in my home. In my own home! This was all part of their control
▪ All those times at four o’clock in the morning when I had to go out into the living room as a little girl and say, “Shut up, Mama!” as my father lay passed-out drunk in his chair—those times would come back to me at four in the morning when I woke up and stared at the ceiling, wondering how those people had come to be in charge again.
Chapter 41
▪ Aside from my fear that my father was plotting something
▪ The program was supposedly a “luxury” rehab that had created a special program for me, so I’d be alone and wouldn’t have to interact with other people.
▪ “What if I don’t go?” I asked. (Britney thinks of not going)
▪ He said, “We will make you look like a fucking idiot, and trust me, you will not win. It’s better me telling you to go versus a judge in court telling you.” (Her father saying spiteful shit)
▪ My no in that room that day really pissed my dad off. (She didn't say no tho....)
▪ They forced me to go. They had my back against a wall and I had no choice.
Chapter 42
▪ What I think did the most damage to me was watching all those people coming and going while I was prevented from leaving. (Prison)
▪ A very pretty girl arrived and became instantly popular. It felt like high school, where she was the cheerleader and I was the demoralized nerd. She skipped all of the meetings. (Britney sounds childish)
▪ I thought she’d never ask. “Yeah,” I said.
▪ I look at the fact that I survived and I think, That wasn’t me; that was God. (She still does not believe herself)
Chapter 43
▪ It reminded me of what I’d always heard about the way they’d test to see if someone was a witch in the olden days.
▪ They’d throw the woman into a pond. If she floated, she was a witch and would be killed. If she sank, she was innocent, and, oh well. She was dead either way
▪ I also texted my sister when I was in that place and asked her to get me out.
“Stop fighting it,” she texted back. “There’s nothing you can do about it, so stop fighting it.” (Britney's sister)
▪ It was women on a talk show talking about me and the conservatorship. One was wearing a #FreeBritney T-shirt.
▪ The same way I believe that I can sense how someone’s feeling in Nebraska, I think my connection to my fans helped them subconsciously know that I was in danger. We have a connection, no matter where we are in space. (Is she crazy?)
▪ And I did long to know that people might care whether I lived or died (Lonely....)
▪ What do we have except our connections to one another?
▪ If you stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself: from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Chapter 44
▪ It crossed my mind that they were only visiting to finish off what they’d started a few months earlier, to kill me for real
▪ That August, my father was arguing with Sean Preston, who was thirteen at the time. My son went to lock himself in a bedroom to end the fight, and my dad broke down the door and shook him. Kevin filed a police report, and my father was barred from seeing the kids.
▪ Because I didn’t want those people running my life anymore. I didn’t even want them in my goddamn kitchen
Chapter 45
▪ I’d rather be “crazy” and able to make what I want than “a good sport” and doing what everyone tells me to do without being able to actually express myself (#goals)
▪ Humor made it possible for me not to get consumed by bitterness
▪ I guess what I’m saying is that the mystery of who the real me is, is to my advantage—because nobody knows!
▪ I love them for their depth and their character, their talent and their goodness
▪ Why did I keep talking to them? I’m not sure. Why do we ever stay in dysfunctional relationships?
Chapter 47
▪ I’ve lied and told the whole world I’m okay and I’m happy. It’s a lie. I thought that maybe if I just said that enough, maybe I might become happy, because I’ve been in denial… But now I’m telling you the truth, okay? I’m not happy. I can’t sleep. I’m so angry it’s insane. And I’m depressed. I cry every day
▪ And I’m tired of feeling alone. I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does, by having a child, a family, any of those things, and more so.
Chapter 48
▪ The whole world knew I needed a new lawyer, and finally I realized the same thing. It was time to take back control of my own life.
▪ After a big court hearing on September 29, my father was suspended as my conservator.
▪ The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.
▪ He said that by giving my testimony, I’d freed myself and probably also helped other people in unfair conservatorships.
▪ it meant everything to have this man tell me that I’d made the difference in my own life
▪ It’s way better when someone drives you, I’ve found
▪ 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.
▪ Singing makes me feel confident and strong the same way exercise does, or prayer (#rules
Values are important)
▪ Don’t underestimate your power (#goals)
▪ It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself (#goals)
▪ When you have nothing, that pain gets intensified by your inability to escape
▪ For thirteen years, I wasn’t allowed to eat what I wanted, to drive, to spend my money how I wanted, to drink alcohol or even coffee
Chapter 49
▪ I’ve come to see what kind of people I want to be around and what kind of people I don’t
▪ It’s been a while since I felt truly present in my own life, in my own power, in my womanhood. But I’m here now.