About midway through The Woman in Me, Britney Spears confesses she felt like a curse was placed on her after her breakup with Justin Timberlake. “Confess” is a dramatic way to describe this moment, but I think that’s what it is. Spears seems to acknowledge that of all the woo stuff she believes in (Kabbalah and aliens, for example), curses are kind of extreme. And yet — she can find no other way to explain the unbelievable calamity of her life after the breakup with Timberlake.
Spears attributes the way the press turned on her after the breakup, her subsequent behavior (“I admit it. I was bad,” she writes), and ultimately the now infamous conservatorship to supernatural intervention. But also — she begins The Woman in Me with a chapter that reads a lot like the monologue one might give on a psych intake appointment in response to the question, “Do you have any family history of mental illness?”
“Tragedy runs in my family,” Spears writes. “My middle name comes from my father’s mother, Emma Jean Spears, who went by Jean. I’ve seen pictures of her, and I understand why everyone said we look alike. Same blond hair. Same smile. She looked younger than she was.” Britney seems to see her Great Grandmother Emma Jean as a sort of double for herself — an uncanny cry echoing to the present moment, the scream that starts in an ancestor’s throat and comes out of your own mouth many year’s later.
In a recent post on Britney conspiracy theories, I suggested that Spears will never recover from the trauma of what has happened to her. That while Britney may be technically #free, we can all see she continues to suffer. I still believe this — and her memoir does nothing to contradict this viewpoint (QED: the curse) — but I think maybe it does something even more powerful. Through the charting of her family’s history and a conscious placement of herself within a legacy of patriarchal control and confinement, Spears memoir transcends celebrity gossip and becomes instead a document of her liberation. Not just from her thirteen year long conservatorship, but from a cyclical pattern of oppression rooted in both sides of her family.
In the parlance of TikTok trauma therapy, Spears is a “cycle-breaker,” a term drawn from family and marriage therapists to describe a person who intentionally works to end unhealthy behavioral patterns in their family of origin. While traditional therapy* focuses on individual growth, “cycle-breaking acknowledges the role of context, culture, history, trauma, and resilience in families.”
Spears draws direct connections between such context, culture, and history when she reflects on the institutionalization and subsequent suicide of her Great Grandmother Emma Jean, writing:
Her husband — my grandfather June Spears Sr. was abusive. Jean suffered the loss of a baby when he was only three days old. June sent Jean to Southeast Louisiana Hospital, a by-all-accounts horrible asylum in Mandeville, where she was put on Lithium. 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 can’t imagine the grief she must have felt.
The way people talk about men like June in the South is to say, “Nothing was good enough for him,” that he was “a perfectionist,” that he was “a very involved father.” I would probably put it more harshly than that.
June was an officer for the Baton Rouge Police Department and he eventually had ten children with three wives. As far as I can tell, no one has one good word to say about the first fifty years of his life. Even in my family, it was said that the Spears men tended to be bad news, especially in terms of how they treated women.
Jean wasn’t the only wife June sent to the mental hospital in Mandeville. He sent his second wife there, too. One of my father’s half sisters has said that June sexually abused her starting when she was eleven, until she ran away at sixteen.
My father was thirteen when Jean died on that grave. I know that trauma is part of why my father was how he was with my siblings and me; why, for him, nothing was ever good enough. My father pushed my brother to excel in sports. He drank until he couldn’t think anymore. He’d disappear for days at a time. When my father drank, he was extremely mean.
This recounting of familial history takes place within the first chapters of The Woman in Me. Much later in the memoir, when Spears recalls her own forced institutionalization at the hands of her “traumatized” father she brings the insidious circle back to herself, revealing she was also put on Lithium in the mental hospital. “It isn’t lost on me,” Spears states bluntly, “that this is the same drug my Great Grandmother Emma Jean was on when she killed herself.”
On her mother’s side of the family, Spears describes a different kind of isolation experienced by her Grandmother Lilian Portell. London-born, “elegant and sophisticated” Grandma Lily would later become the inspiration for the Princess of Pop’s obsession with speaking in a British accent.
In her own lifetime, however, Grandma Lily was the wife of an American soldier, Barney Bridges, whom she met while he was stationed overseas during World War II. In a passage that, I kid you not, reminds me very much a scene from Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Spears writes:
She was disappointed, though, when he brought her with him to America. She’d imagined a life like what she had in London. As she rode to his dairy farm from New Orleans, she looked out the window of Barney’s car and was troubled by how empty his world seemed. “Where are all the lights?” she kept asking her new husband.
I sometimes think about Lily riding through the Louisiana countryside, looking out into the night, realizing that her large, vibrant, music-filled life or afternoon teas and London museums was about to become small and hard… My family said that Barney didn’t want to let Lily go back to London because he thought that if she went, she wouldn’t come home.
My mother said that Lily was so distracted by her thoughts that she had a tendency to start clearing the table before everyone was done eating.
While it is her Great Grandmother Emma Jean that Spears draws the most direct comparisons to, it occurs to me that Britney’s own arc from running through casinos with Paris Hilton to her disassociated existence under the conservatorship is another doubling. As was her Grandmother Lily, Britney is disallowed from returning to her real life for fear that she will never come back to the life where she works for her family. The choice to include this line about Lily clearing the table before dinner has finished is especially poignant to me. I wonder if Spears keeps this easily cut detail in her memoir because it is so evocative of her own alienation; of the way her own rote and forced labor removed her from her life, distanced her from the purpose of the work itself and extracted any meaning it might have for her.
Which is exactly why The Woman in Me is so astounding to me. It’s a book written by a woman deeply entrenched in a history of profound abuse who not just breaks the cycle, but records it. “You can't fuck with a woman who really knows how to pray,” Britney writes near the book’s conclusion. But I’d suggest you also can’t fuck with a woman really knows how to write (or even hire a ghost writer who does).
“You can't fuck with a woman who really knows how to pray,” Britney writes near the book’s conclusion. But I’d suggest you also can’t fuck with a woman really knows how to write (or even hire a ghost writer who does).
The work Spears does in this book makes me think of Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton. The New York Times describes Ancestor Trouble as “a periphrastic construction of identity itself,” which is to say it is a book about how to figure out who you are not through inward practices (meditation, psychoanalysis) but through your connection to the many contexts in which we all exist. It is to understand yourself not as a (pop) star, but as a point in a constellation. This is the practice of “Simultaneously build[ing] and excavat[ing] identity, and it’s a blueprint for making something of cultural, intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual and genetic legacies often burdened with messy debris. And it is the story of each of us, of identity — a complex configuration made of chromosomes, evidence and accidents; internal and external traumas; global and local pressures; fixed and fluctuating selves; spiritual and environmental modes.”
In their review of The Woman in Me, the NYT claims the memoir isn’t the “blazing feminist manifesto that some witnesses to history may have wanted Spears to write.” I suppose I’d argue the book is something more profound than any manifesto could be.
It is impossible for me not to acknowledge Spears as the embodiment of an era that both hated women (Spears drives this point home many times) and persuasively and effectively internalized that hatred in women themselves. It is complicated to note that Spears is both a victim of this culture; a tool used by it; and a person who used the culture as her own tool. She benefited enormously from her ability to so utterly embody the era’s standards for behavior and appearance, until she didn’t. Until the very traits she was lauded for — her girlishness, her innocence, her sweetness — were turned against her.
But who hasn’t experienced this? A sort of large scale grooming; a life spent attaining traits that ultimately make you tractable and serve not yourself but your earning potential. The NYT claims Spears “is still emerging, famously, from the black hole of a bizarrely visible captivity whose conditions, revealed in recent court hearings, seem outrageous and frankly absurd in the 21st century.”
But…is it absurd? While it’s easy to interpret public fascination with Spears conservatorship as a salacious interest in the “outrageous” elements of the situation, I actually think it's the opposite. We’re fixated by it because it is in a sense what happened to many of us — the “visible captivity” of growing up in a culture that almost exclusively encouraged us to act against out own best interests. Just as Britney’s experience mirrors that of her Great Grandmother, our cultural experience mirrors Britney’s own.
I’ve seen a lot of jokes about this book. And at points, of course it is funny. Spears’ observations and diction are those of a person whose viewpoint gelled as a teenager — she frequently refers to her management as “weird asses”; we’ve all heard Michelle William’s impersonate Justin by this point. So, yes, it is sometimes a hilarious and often a salacious work of revenge, but The Woman in Me is also a raw piece of testimony, a living embodiment of deprogramming from our fembot in chief.
Publicly (and in the accent of the Grandmother who etched the pattern of trauma Spears would live out) Britney ends a cycle of abuse with an actual Call-the-Governor-moment when she contacts 911, finally triggering the end of the conservatorship. The Woman in Me isn’t a feminist manifesto, it’s something more magical. It’s a guide for breaking not a curse, but a cycle.
Your camp rec for this month: Buy (or, hell, make) yourself a Britney Spears prayer candle, stare into its flame this Samhain, and while the veil is thin, see what ancestral cycles you yourself have inherited.
*Spears writes that, in addition to four AA meetings, she was court ordered to attend two hours of therapy a week for the entirety of the conservatorship.