Before their release, the pop star published a few excerpts, but the book itself mainly revealed new scandalous details of her life.
At 13, she started smoking and drinking at the same time - along with her mother. By the sixth grade, she was sleeping in the same bed as her brother, and at 18 she started taking Prozac. The major pop star of the 2000s, Britney Spears, talked openly about all this and more in her memoir, which was released Oct. 24. Izvestia read the book and picked out the most interesting quotes.
He almost died in an accident
The narrative of the memoir is told in chronological order: Spears devotes about a fifth of the book to her childhood and her family: the problems in her life began even then. One of his first traumatic experiences happened when he was 4 years old: his older brother was in an ATV accident and suffered serious injuries and broken bones.
"When he came back from the hospital, I didn't leave him. I slept next to him every night. Because he was almost all in a cast, he needed a special bed. They put a mattress next to me, but sometimes I would climb up to cuddle him," Spears writes.
But even after her brother's recovery, the future pop singer continued to share a bed until the sixth grade. It got to the point where Spears' mother was forced to intervene. And though Britney fought back, she had to move into a separate room.
Spears also admitted that at the age of 13, she began drinking alcohol with her mother and smoking cigarettes with friends. She had to be hidden from her mother, but managed to reveal her daughter's secret, which almost caused a tragedy during a car trip (Britney learned to drive in her teens).
"Suddenly she took her hand off the steering wheel to smell it. At that moment I lost control of the car, it started to spin and we went off the road. I thought we were going to die. Then boom, the back of the car hit a telephone pole. It was a real miracle: if we had hit him head-on, we would have gone out the front window," Spears said of the incident. Her younger sister Jamie Lynn was in the back seat at the same time.
Already closer to 18 years old, fame and popularity got to Spears and with it came criticism and accusations of being a negative influence on American youth.
"I'm not their mother and I have to remain myself. I know there will be people who won't like me very much," Spears said during an appearance on MTV. But, as the star admitted, the episode affected her greatly. This was the first serious negative reaction from people. To somehow cope with the stress, Britney Spears started taking Prozac, a powerful antidepressant.
Despite frequent conflicts with her parents, especially with her father over his alcohol problems, Britney managed to give them a new home and pay off all of her father's debts. The funds came after the successful release of Oops!... I Did It Again. As Spears admitted in her memoir, she just wanted to give them a chance to start over and her relationship with her relatives was initially rather good.
Misfortune in love
At the age of 19, Britney was already dating Justin Timberlake and pregnant with his child. The star had to have an abortion because the musician was not happy with the news. As the singer stated in her memoir, Justin insisted on home "treatment".
"We decided I couldn't go to the hospital because no one was supposed to know about the abortion." Now I understand how wrong that was. We didn't even tell our family. On the appointed day, I took the pills, my stomach started to clench, and I sat in the bathroom for hours. I wanted to go to the doctor, I was so scared. I was lying on the floor thinking I was going to die," Britney recalls.
Her affair with Timberlake lasted four years and, as the singer admits in the book, Justin started cheating on her after only a year and she knew it. But the singer chose to just keep quiet even though the media pointed it out. For a long time, she suffered several betrayals, but then she did with her "lover" as he did with her: she spent the night with Wade Robson. Subsequently, Justin and Britney broke up, but it was the girl who was accused of infidelity. The series of difficult relationships didn't end there. She then married her childhood friend Jason Allen in Vegas "out of boredom", but the marriage only lasted a few hours.
Then there was the relationship with Kevin Federline, but it didn't go too smoothly with him either. While they were dating, she was told that Kevin and his ex-girlfriend were having a baby.
"I didn't believe it, but when I asked Kevin, he admitted it." He said he saw them once a month," Spears wrote.
Later, the couple begins to drift apart, and in 2006 they divorce. As a result, Britney lost custody of her two children. After that, she fell into depression and, as she admitted in her memoir, she started drinking alcohol and drugs.
"I've never had a problem with alcohol." I liked to drink, but everything was always under control. You know what I used to purposely use to relieve stress? "Adderall." It's an amphetamine-based drug given to children with attention deficit disorder. I was weird about Adderall, but it gave me a few hours without depression. It was the only drug that worked for me as an antidepressant," reveals the star.
Jailer's Keeper
The last third of the book is devoted to the most difficult period in Britney Spears' life: she spent 13 years under the tutelage of her father. Here, the star also shared scandalous details of her personal life and told how much money her father made from her "imprisonment".
"I made a lot of money for a lot of people, especially my father. As I found out, he paid himself a higher salary than I did. He got more than $6 million and his associates and accomplices got tens of millions," Spears calculated. The star also revealed how much the services of her assigned lawyers cost. All payments were made at her expense.
"My father and lawyer Andrew Wallet has taken on the role of guardian. The latter was paid more than $426,000 to prevent me from getting my money. I was also forced to pay more than $500,000 to a court-appointed lawyer. I wasn't even allowed to compensate him."
Next, Britney remembers what her father told her when she finished conservatory.
"I'm just letting you know I'm in charge now, and you sit back in your chair and listen to what I'm saying." I'm Britney Spears now," the pop star admits she was terrified. At some point, her father's control became too much and extended to his personal life.
"When someone wanted to go on a date with me, my father's security team would ask questions about the person, make them sign a confidentiality document and also require them to take a blood test. And before the first date, my entire medical and sexual history was disclosed to the potential partner. It was just humiliating," Spears complains.
During her guardianship, her father became a multimillionaire. For example, during the Circus Tour, he received a percentage of his income (about $16,000 a month). The singer was ready to endure this in order to have the right to communicate with her children. The girl was allotted about 2 thousand dollars a week, although she organized more than 240 performances in Vegas and sold 900 thousand tickets. Each of those shows brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if Spears wanted to buy new shoes, she had to consult her guardians beforehand, and they simply could not approve the purchase. And her father hired a company called Black Box to monitor her incoming and outgoing calls, text messages and personal letters.
"The most disgusting thing is that my father installed a bug in my own house! That was their plan to control me," Britney recalls.
In addition to Prozac and Adderall, Spears was forced to take lithium, a powerful and dangerous psychotropic. It was prescribed to her grandmother, Jean Spears, and then the woman committed suicide.
"I didn't want to take it, it slowed my reaction and made me lethargic. Because of it, my sense of time was distorted, I was lost in space. Sometimes I didn't even understand where I was, who I was. My brain just stopped working," the singer said of her feelings.
In 2021, the Britney Spears Conservatory was completed, which the singer also talked about in her memoir. For her, it was "the happiest day", and as the star wrote, she felt free again.
The book ended with a funny message for fans on social media. Spears included several black flower emoticons and asked readers, "If you follow me online, you thought I'd write a memoir made entirely of emoticons, right?
(Izvestia/Oleg Kleshchev/Jana Černá)
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