In ‘The Woman in Me,’ a Free Britney Spears Explains How She Survived the Men in Her Life: Book Review
24.10.2023 - 22:23
/ variety.com
Stephen Rodrick America has long reveled in the destruction of young women. Here’s a short and not comprehensive list: Judy Garland was given amphetamines at age 16 on the set of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1938. Frances Farmer was institutionalized against her will in 1942, and Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her ex-manager in 1980 at the age of 20.
Britney Spears was born a year after Stratten’s death. Her new memoir, “The Woman in Me,” suggests that not much progress has been made in not destroying the women we all purport to love. Let’s start at the end.
It’s 2021 and the height of the COVID pandemic, so Britney Spears is appearing virtually in a Los Angeles court. She is pleading for her freedom. A woman who has moved tens of millions of records, sold out global tours, and held a lucrative Las Vegas residency is begging for freedom from her father who has controlled her every move for the past 13 years.
The call started, and she was full of fear, she writes: “My voice had been used for me, and against me, so many times I was afraid nobody would recognize it now if I spoke freely. What if they called me crazy? What if they said I was lying?” Most of her speech to the judge wasn’t about the millions that her father — supposedly in her best interests — had leeched from her while she was under a conservatorship. Instead, she asked to be treated like, well, a human.
“I deserve to have the same rights as anybody does,” said Spears then. “By having a child, a family, any of those things.” How the biggest female pop star of the post-Madonna era found herself begging for her basic human rights is equal parts old school Faulkner and post-modern Nathaniel West. She was raised in Kenwood, Louisiana by James Spears, a tyrannical
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