Britney Spears has finally opened up about how being placed under a 13-year court-mandated conservatorship impacted her autonomy and sense of self.
From 2008 to 2021, the former pop star’s personal finances and affairs were all under the control of her father Jamie Spears.
During her 2021 testimony, the “Circus” singer told the court: “I just want my life back.”
Now, nearly two years later, Spears, 41, has candidly written about the conservatorship in her forthcoming memoir The Woman in Me, saying that it “stripped me of my womanhood”.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” the “Oops!...I Did It Again” singer writes in an excerpt, via People.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Spears notes that feeling as if she had no freedom meant that she could quickly “vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman”.
“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in – only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time,” she adds.
Britney Spears— (Getty Images)
“I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life – those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
Following a bidding war between multiple publishing houses, the memoir was ultimately acquired by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Both the audio version and print version of The Woman in Me will be released on 24 October.
Last week, it was revealed that Michelle Williams will be narrating Spears’s audiobook after the singer admitted she’d found it too painful to “relive” her experiences once more.
Michelle Williams and Britney Spears— (Getty Images)
“This book has been a labour of love and all the emotions that come with it,” Spears said in a statement. “Reliving everything has been exciting, heart-wrenching, and emotional, to say the least. For those reasons, I will only be reading a small part of my audiobook.”
She added: “I am so grateful to the amazing Michelle Williams for reading the rest of it.”
The Woman in Me is out on 24 October.
