Spears’ mental health got worse and worse. It seems she was incredibly depressed, and had few people she could rely on. When she met her now former husband, Kevin Federline, what struck her the most was how he would just sit and hold her.
“It wasn’t about lust, it was intimate,” she writes. “He would hold me as long as I wanted to be held. Had anyone in my life ever done that before? If so, I couldn’t remember when.”
The description of Federline is so nakedly desperate for love and affection, so unbearably sad, that it almost made me uncomfortable to read. And as we all know, things only got worse! Federline got Spears pregnant twice in rapid succession, then abandoned her after he became infatuated with fame. Losing her husband drove Spears into a deep depression that, ultimately, led to her well-publicized 2007 “meltdown.”
It somehow gets even worse. I don’t need to rehash here, we all know the story. Spears spent the next 13 years in a conservatorship, being controlled by the same father she alleges terrorised her as a child. After spending the first half of her life desperately trying to escape her abusive and dysfunctional family, she ended up right back where she started, an adult under the complete control of her parents. The back half of the book describes this period in excruciating detail, from the hopelessness Spears felt to the anger and sadness that crushed her daily. At times, she writes, she felt like a “Ghost Child,” whose sole purpose existed to make other people’s, mainly her immediate family’s, lives better.
“I became a robot…a sort of child-robot,” she writes, adding, “If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out.”
We will never know what Spears could have become if she had been allowed to handle her trauma and pain following her divorce with dignity. But she does have that opportunity now.
Free to speak her mind for the first time in years, Spears says she is optimistic about the future. But there’s little lightness here. Spears has had an extremely hard life, one that we, the public, have debated for sport for more than two decades now.
For Spears, a happy ending means small things, like learning how to find happiness again.
“I know what makes me happy and brings me joy,” she writes in the book’s final pages. “I try to meditate on those places and thoughts that enable me to experience it.”
In many ways, Britney Spears’ memoir feels like a goodbye, at least to the popstar persona we all equate with Spears. She writes that she is asked constantly when she will perform again, but she’s not sure if she will. And who could blame her? Maybe the greatest gift this book could be for Spears is showing us we all need to back off and allow her to heal in private. Hasn’t she been through enough?
“There’s been a lot of speculation about how I’m doing,” she writes. “I know my fans care. I am free now. I’m just being myself and trying to heal.”
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at GLAMOUR US and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
This story originally appeared on GLAMOUR US.