She has never really known freedom

As a child, Britney escaped her difficult home life – her alcoholic father often rowing with her mother – into the outdoors, which “gave me a sense of aliveness and danger”, she writes. Performing also makes her feel invincible. But by the age of 16, she is public property – incapable of going outside without being mobbed, and her love of singing and dancing now a lucrative resource.

By the time of her second album, she wants for so little: skinny-dipping with her dancers after playing Rock in Rio in January 2001 is one of her happiest memories. “It was a taste of rebellion and freedom, but I was just having fun and being a 19-year-old,” she writes. After her split from Justin Timberlake, she dreams about quitting pop and opening a shop: “With the gift of hindsight I can see that I hadn’t given myself enough time to heal from the breakup,” she writes – though her requests for a break are not only turned down, but interpreted as a potential sign of sedition to be quashed and interrogated.

In this restrictive environment, small kindnesses take on an outsized significance, like Paris Hilton encouraging her “to have fun for the first time in a long time”, leading to some infamous nights out with the heiress and Lindsay Lohan. Once again, Britney is seen as stepping out of bounds, potentially damaging her earning potential. One night she has her mother babysit her sons; when she returns home tipsy, Lynne Spears screams at her, she writes. “The shame I felt killed my heart. I stood there, reeling, and thought, OK, I guess it’s forbidden for me to party.” As the restrictions get tighter, Britney acts out – and ends up legally denied her freedom for 13 years, under a conservatorship controlled by her father.

Her body felt like public property

From day one, Britney’s body is made fair game. Between the videos for her debut single, Baby, One More Time and Sometimes, the media noted her changing physique and concluded that the 16-year-old must have had breast implants – rather than simply going through puberty. She notices that talkshow hosts ask her about her chest, while her boyfriend Justin Timberlake gets asked serious questions about his music. It’s one of many pressures that ultimately push her to breaking point, and when she writes about shaving her head in a salon in 2007, she frames it as a “fuck you” to the impossible beauty standards she felt forced to live up to: “I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top.”

That brief moment of freedom doesn’t last long: a year later, she is ambushed into the conservatorship, which also exercises jurisdiction over her body. “No matter how much I dieted and exercised, my father was always telling me I was fat,” she writes. Punishing gym routines leave her feeling “out of my mind”. Her diet is monitored – along with every other detail of her life – while she goes through the motions of her Las Vegas residency. “My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage. And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body.”

Here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body

On the other side of the conservatorship, she writes, freedom looks like being able to gain weight without anyone “shouting at me”. It’s eating chocolate again. It’s posting selfies – either nude or clothed – on Instagram. Some people don’t understand the latter, she writes, “but I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture, doing whatever I want with it.”

Her ‘virginity’ was a prison

Britney was actively marketed as a virgin, a repulsive, archaic premise that made the 16-year-old’s inevitable sexuality into a kind of timebomb. In fact, she writes happily, she first slept with her older brother’s best friend when she was 14. Yet the fixation on her “purity” took “the focus off me as a musician and a performer”, she writes. “All some reporters could think of to ask me was whether or not my breasts were real (they were, actually) and whether or not my hymen was intact.”

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake in 2002. Photograph: Tom Mihalek/AFP/Getty Images

When Timberlake tells the world that she cheated on him, she is all but emblazoned with a scarlet letter. While she knows she is powerless against that narrative (“I don’t think Justin realised the power he had in shaming me. I don’t think he understands to this day”), him telling the world that they had a sexual relationship was liberating. “To be honest with you, I liked that Justin said that,” she writes. “Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my 20s? Whose business was it if I’d had sex or not?”

But she still couldn’t escape the cycle that Timberlake set in motion: she describes her 2004 Onyx Hotel tour in the aftermath as “too sexual, for a start. Justin had embarrassed me publicly, so my rebuttal onstage was to kind of go there a little bit, too. But it was absolutely horrible.”

She has an immaculate sense of shade

Britney seems too pure of heart for active malice, but she has an immaculate way with a piercing characterisation. Timberlake’s band, ‘NSync, were big hip-hop heads, she writes, and sometimes “tried too hard to fit in” with Black artists. When Timberlake spots Ginuwine at an event, he “got all excited and said, so loud, ‘Oh yeah fo shiz, fo shiz! Ginuwiiiine! What’s up, homie!’”

Her account of being encouraged to abort their pregnancy at home, lest anyone see them going in and out of hospital, is horrifying. Britney, with no pain relief, is writhing on the floor. Timberlake proves to be the last person you’d call in a crisis. “At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it,” she writes. Almost as embarrassing is husband Kevin Federline’s attempt to start a music career. “He really thought he was a rapper now,” she writes, with the bafflement of someone who has never known pretension. “Bless his heart – because he did take it so seriously.”

Motherhood leaves her vulnerable

When Britney gets pregnant with her first son, she initially thinks it might protect her: “I wanted everyone to stay away: stand back! There’s a baby here!” Inevitably, it doesn’t work out that way. The paparazzi become aggressive, particularly once she has her kids in quick succession – becoming pregnant a second time three months after giving birth to her first. She suffers from postnatal depression and feels hopeless about her ability to protect her sons: “I got a little depressed once I was no longer keeping them safe inside my body … I wanted them back inside me so the world couldn’t get at them.”

Every part of normal life had been stripped from me. I had no freedom and yet also no security

She has a keen sense of injustice regarding a perceived contract that she never signed with the public and the press. “They just kept acting like I owed it to them to let the men who kept trying to catch me looking fat take photos of my infant sons.” Her postpartum body and shots of her without makeup were treated as “some kind of a sin – as if gaining weight was something unkind I’d done to them personally, a betrayal. At what point did I promise to stay 17 for the rest of my life?”

What she knows now, she writes, “is that every part of normal life had been stripped from me – going out in public without becoming a headline, making normal mistakes as a new mother of two babies, feeling like I could trust the people around me. I had no freedom and yet also no security. At the time I was also suffering, I now know, from severe postpartum depression.” It left her suicidal. “I’ll admit it, I felt that I couldn’t live if things didn’t get better.”

She knows she is trapped in a state of arrested development

It’s often said that famous people are frozen in time at the age they became famous, but Britney was never allowed to be a real child, nor a real adult. Her 2001 single I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman may be her most prescient recording; she is painfully conscious of this divide. After her split from Timberlake, she likens herself to Benjamin Button. “Somehow that year, in becoming more vulnerable I started to feel like a child again.”

The situation worsens amid postnatal depression. “It was as if some part of me became the baby,” she writes in an apologetic section about transferring her frustrations on to her interior decorator. “One part of me was a very demanding grown woman yelling about white marble, while another part of me was suddenly very childlike.”

When she is placed under the conservatorship, she not only regresses, but feels dehumanised by the constant scrutiny. “I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child.” It’s hard to explain, she says, “how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom … They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.”

Music seems to have become an afterthought

Early on, Britney writes, she loved making music. She told the producer Max Martin that she wanted to sound more R&B than straight pop; she listened to Tainted Love the night before recording Baby, One More Time and stayed up late so that she would sound as gravelly and “fried” as Marc Almond. She was a studio perfectionist who would stay in the booth for hours, and the school setting and uniforms of the Baby video were her idea. “That’s probably the moment in my life when I had the most passion for music,” she writes. “I was unknown and I had nothing to lose if I messed up.”

After that, her music barely gets a mention in A Woman Like Me. There’s a nod to her breaking records; the era-defining Toxic is dispensed with in a sentence. The only album that she goes into any kind of detail on is 2007’s cult favourite Blackout, made at the height of her public struggles yet full of potential. The studio was a refuge from the paparazzi hounding her outside; making a messy DIY video for the single Gimme More may be “by far the worst video I’ve ever shot in my life”, but the scrappiness meant “more interesting people started noticing and wanting to work with me”. There’s some later love for 2016’s Glory, and she writes proudly about her 2022 collaboration with Elton John, but says she has no plans to make music at the moment.

Her life under the conservatorship is a horror story

It feels fitting that The Woman in Me is being released a week before Halloween. No matter how much we already know about the 13 years that Britney lived under a conservatorship, her recounting of its imposition, life under it and her inability to escape it is nothing short of a horror story. It is appalling, like something out of a Victorian novel, not the very real experiences of a thirtysomething in the last decade.

When she fears that Federline is going to take away access to her kids, she locks herself in a bathroom with one of her sons. “Before I knew what was happening, a Swat team in black suits burst through the bathroom door as if I’d hurt someone,” she writes, and she is subject to a forced hospital hold. Soon after, her mother invites her to her beach house because “the cops are after you”. When she arrives, so does another Swat team. “I’m a five-foot four-inch pop singer who calls everyone sir and ma’am,” she writes. “They treated me like I was a criminal or predator.”

The conservatorship clamps down on her life, ruled by her father, who she alleges was “an alcoholic, someone who’d declared bankruptcy, who’d failed in business, who’d terrified me as a little girl”. She is medicated and surveilled. Her dates are required to agree to background checks and blood tests, made to sign NDAs, and receive a full rundown of her sexual history before the first date. “The insanity of this system kept me from finding basic companionship, having a fun night out or making new friends – let alone falling in love,” Britney writes. “It was just the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to my music, my career and my sanity.”

She accedes in order to retain access to her boys, but questions how she can perform at such a high level when she is perceived as “so sick that I couldn’t make my own decisions”. She makes futile attempts to escape the arrangement; meanwhile her father sends her to rehab and Alcoholics Anonymous because she has been taking over-the-counter energy supplements. The women at AA inspire her to start trying to take control over her life but she just hits more walls. Her father won’t let her remove her IUD to start a family with her new boyfriend, later husband, Sam Ashgari (they have divorced since Britney completed the memoir). After she objects to a new dance move suggested for her Vegas residency, she is sent to a solitary rehabilitation facility for two months, the most upsetting part of the book.

Was I a bank robber? A wild animal? Why was I treated as though I were about to burn the place down and murder them all?

She is locked up, put on lithium, subject to relentless testing and mandatory therapy, can’t see her kids or dog, can’t bathe or dress in private or shut the door to her room, has set bed and waking times. For blood tests, “the tech drawing my blood would be flanked by the nurse, a security guard and my assistant. Was I a cannibal? Was I a bank robber? Was I a wild animal? Why was I treated as though I were about to burn the place down and murder them all?” She wonders if her family is trying to kill her. Made slow and sclerotic, “I began to feel like I was being ritually tortured,” she writes, feeling estranged from her own body. “If the idea of my being in that place was to heal, that was not the effect.”

She’s not scared of anything after that experience, she writes, “but it doesn’t make me feel strong; it makes me sad. I shouldn’t be this strong.”

#FreeBritney protesters in 2021. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA
A nurse shows Britney the blossoming fan movement that is spreading awareness of its suspicions that all is not right with her conservatorship. Come June 2021, she calls 911 to report her father for conservatorship abuse days before a probate court hearing on the arrangement. “My voice had been used for me and against me so many times that I was afraid nobody would recognise it now if I spoke freely,” she writes. When she is granted her freedom in November 2021, she says she feels shock, relief, elation, sadness and joy.

There is no love lost for her family

Britney writes about how she was always made to feel she was not enough as a kid; her father’s alleged alcoholism, neglect and brutal standards; how her mother always made her feel less-than. She is unsparing about her younger sister, who she characterises as a brat who was spared the pain of Britney’s impoverished childhood because of her success. “My mom and I had to witness the ugliness and the violence without believing that there was anywhere else to go.”

Even once Britney is the biggest pop star in the world, her parents still seem to have an undue say in the running of her career, including making her sit for humiliating TV interviews – why exactly that is remains unanswered. Her father seizes control legally with the imposition of the conservatorship, telling her, chillingly, “I am Britney Spears now,” and her family appear to live off her dime while she lives an extraordinarily restricted life.

When she returns home from the forced stint in a brutal rehab facility, she finds that her parents have thrown away her childhood things, including a binder full of her poetry. “I felt an overwhelming sadness. I thought of the pages I’d written through tears. I never wanted to publish them or anything like that, but they were important to me. And my family had thrown them in the trash, just like they’d thrown me away.” She resolves to start over with a new notebook. “In that moment I made peace with my family,” she writes. “By which I mean that I realised I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that.”

Britney writes that she is working to feel “more compassion than anger” towards them. “It’s not easy.”

• The headline of this article was amended on 24 October 2023 because an earlier version included a truncated quote; it has been clarified that Britney Spears said she “felt like” she was being ritually tortured.