The actions taken by Spears in response to the madness around her were, in the circumstances, only proof of her sanity, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
‘The truly weird and sinister thing about this history is that the story put out by Spears’s family was broadly publicly accepted.’‘The truly weird and sinister thing about this history is that the story put out by Spears’s family was broadly publicly accepted.
The irony is that from the outside, the trajectory of the singer’s life and career looks like a classic catch-22 in which the central trauma is so profound that no single position in regards to it is preferable to another. In the book, Spears recounts how, from her earliest success as a 16-year-old pop star to her relationship with Justin Timberlake and the birth of the two children she had with Kevin Federline, she was harassed, taunted and belittled at every turn.
Or to put it more expressly in Joseph Heller’s terms: the actions taken by Spears in response to the madness around her – to shave her head, attack snappers and act, as her own family cynically characterised it, “crazy” – were, in the circumstances, only proof of her sanity.
It’s hard, looking back, not to find the roots of all this in a generalised hatred of women, particularly young ones with sexual energy and power. Spears’s father, Jamie, a failed businessman, clearly had financial incentives to keep the conservatorship going, but one wonders more at the emotional needs it fulfilled. The conservatorship finally ended after a, and on the back of an intense and very successful “Free Britney” campaign by her fans.
Meanwhile, Spears is “free”. In the book, she writes about how hard she found it to recalibrate after being publicly embarrassed by Timberlake in the early 2000s, leaning too heavily during her 2004 tour into a sexual persona she feels Timberlake himself helped create. “It was absolutely horrible,” writes Spears, and there are traces, still, of many of the old versions of herself that other people shaped and created. They present differently today, however.
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