With the release of Britney Spears’ upcoming memoir, The Woman In Me, just days away, the 41-year-old singer is sharing the first peek at what we can expect in its pages, and we can already tell that she’s not holding back. In a newly released excerpt, Britney wrote about feeling objectified by the press and even her own father, Jamie Spears, while at the height of her career and how it ultimately drove her to make the shocking decision to shave her head.
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Britney wrote that she's been 'eyeballed' since childhood.
Considering that she got her start on The Mickey Mouse Club at just 11 years old and catapulted to superstardom just a few years after that, it’s not surprising to hear this. In the excerpt from her book, which was shared by People on Tuesday, she admitted that this kind of objectification led to her trying to control the situation in her own way, eventually landing her in a conservatorship that would span more than a decade.
“Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” she wrote. “But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”
Her father was one of her critics.
It wasn’t just the media commenting on Britney’s body — it was also her dad, Jamie Spears, who was actively involved in her career even before acting as her conservator.
“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it,” Britney continued, per People. “Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”
Being controlled under the conservatorship made Britney think about the double standards in Hollywood.
“Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me,” she wrote. “The thing was: I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself.”
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Britney admitted that it was hard for her look back on these darker times in her life.
Talking to People about the book, the Crossroads star said that writing the memoir required her to think about “not getting a moment of peace, the judgments from strangers who don’t even know me, having my freedom stripped away from me by my family and the government [and] losing my passion for the things I love.”
Now, she's ready to share her truth.
“It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future,” she told the magazine.
The Woman In Me is in stores October 24.
