The princess of pop seen as a gothic heroine. It is the unthinkable narrative strategy, due to its audacity, on which Britney Spears' long-awaited autobiography, The Woman I Am (Plaza & Janés), bets, after its simultaneous publication in 26 markets — and the collection of 15 million dollars by its author — into one of the publishing phenomena of 2023. Unlike other stories in the service of the stars, here it is not so much the revelations worthy of a tabloid that matter as the rigorous account of his descent into hell, narrated in a literary voice that has little to do with the neutral or official register of similar products.
Often, the book comes close to a Gothic novel in its Southern variant, set in the semi-rural Louisiana where she was born and, later, in the quagmire of the entertainment industry, where Spears will land as if in the land of Oz, albeit in the hallucinatory version of a Lynchian nightmare. Whoever wrote these lines – according to the American press, his literary black was the journalist Sam Lansky – handles this leitmotif exemplarily. In the first pages, he takes us to the woods of her childhood, where Britney took refuge away from the screams of an alcoholic father and a moronic mother. "Lying in silence on those stones, I felt God," reads a mind-boggling prologue. There's more: the Spears' home was "an insane asylum" in which the protagonist often felt like "a ghost." During her breakout in the 2021s, one day she felt "something dark penetrate her body" and transform her, as if she were "a werewolf," into a bad person. Towards the end, when recalling the mobilization of his followers to the cry of #FreeBritney in <>, he already borders on the esoteric or the paranormal: "In the same way that I think I perceive how someone in Nebraska feels, my connection with the fans subconsciously helped them know that they were in danger."
The book is centered on this captivating character of a woman subjected to manipulation and ridicule, another classic of this subgenre, who at times doubts her sanity, as will happen to the reader. Is this damsel in distress delusional or is she lucid in describing the mistreatment of a system ruled by a ferocious misogyny, which saw in her an easy target because of her apparent fragility, her vulnerable age, her everlasting smile? Another gothic subtext runs through these pages. "The tragedy has marked my family," the narrator warns. Her grandmother Jean committed suicide by shooting herself in the grave of her son who died at the age of three, after falling into a depression and being treated with lithium, as would later happen to the granddaughter she never knew, as if she were the victim of a prophecy. Her given name is Britney Jean.
Her other grandmother had emigrated from the U.K. to the town of 2,000 where the singer grew up cleaning crabs in the family business. Those transatlantic origins gave her an awareness of coming from a more sophisticated place—a London she evokes with a high degree of unreality, full of "tea evenings and museums"—and perhaps moral permission not to end up turned into another rustic in Dinerolandia. It wouldn't be like that: at the age of 13 she smoked and drank daiquiris supplied by her mother and at 14 she lost her virginity to her brother's best friend (with the latter she continued to sleep "until sixth grade", in case there is a psychoanalyst in the room).
Britney Spears in a promotional image from 1998, months before the release of her first album.L. Busacca (WireImage)
At the heart of the book, in every sense of the word, is the account of his downfall. It begins with her separation from Justin Timberlake, martyr of an alleged adultery that will turn Britney into the biggest bitch in the kingdom, into "a whore who had broken the heart of America's favorite boy" (in reality, the infidelity was mutual, but its effects would be asymmetrical). From then on, she lived as if suffering from "a kind of curse." It was followed by a two-day Las Vegas wedding, another union that ended with the loss of custody of their two children, a calamitous performance at the MTV Awards, and a live meltdown when he shaved his head in front of the cameras. And, shortly after, a legal guardianship imposed by his family to prevent the goose that lays the golden eggs, thanks to which they all subsisted, from being completely ruined. Britney spent 13 years under the yoke of her father, who controlled her schedule, her diet and even her contraception.
The character fits into different American imaginaries. Britney is a grown child who will eventually become an adult child, which justifies her recurring comparison to Benjamin Button in the book. "In a way, they transformed me back into a teenager," she writes. He is referring to his family, but it is worth going further. In a country obsessed with knowing if her hymen was still intact, she was tolerated as long as she pretended to be a virgin, but immediately expelled from pop heaven when it became clear that she was using her genitals for more than just reproducing. Enter Hester, the adulterous protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne's American Eve, a scourge of settler Puritanism who also fictionalized the Salem trials in The House of the Seven Gables. It's no coincidence that Britney compares herself to those damned: "They'd throw the woman into a pond and if she floated, she'd be a witch and they'd kill her, but if she sank, she'd be innocent and, boy, would she die anyway." She drowned several times.
We see Lolita, the sexualized girl who ends up becoming a white trash, wandering through the book. To those vulgar women, from an intermediate social stratum between blacks and whites, that Flannery O'Connor describes in his stories. To the heroines who think they are going mad, victims of gaslight, such as Jane Eyre, Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca or the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper. Although the evil here is not caused by perverse stepmothers or crazy women locked in the attic: the villain of this story is, without a doubt, his father. Especially terrifying is the passage in which he announces that, from that moment on, "he will be Britney Spears", thus concluding the usurpation of her personality, another stainless trope of this subgenre.
Britney Spears shaved her head in 2007 in the midst of a legal battle over custody of her children. A few days later he attacked the paparazzi with an umbrella. Cordon Press
Despite being aware that her confessional self is a literary construct – it is enough to compare the book with her rickety texts on Instagram to understand that she has not written it alone – we read these chapters with the conviction that we are listening to her voice. In that sense, as with Michelle Williams in the audiobook version, Lansky's work is admirable. A connection between the artist and his model can be discerned: only six years younger, the writer often writes about stars in the American press and knows what addictions and falls from grace are, having saved himself in extremis from an overdose when he was a promising university student.
Despite the limits of the sacrificial and edifying narrative that the exercise imposes by contract, the co-author of the book manages to leave a personal mark on this assignment and, at the same time, remains faithful to a character who is still an eloquent version of herself, like a songwriter who composed a tailor-made song for her. His nods to Timberlake's wounded masculinity, in his strenuous imitation of African-American codes ("Oh, yes, what a step! Ginuwine! What's new, bro?"), or the tragicomic ordeal that Britney had to beg for chips during her conservatorship and never have them given to her: in order not to gain weight, she was only allowed to eat chicken and canned vegetables ("It was degrading").
The most disturbing moment of this walk through its rise, fall and rehabilitation, of a very considerable psychological depth, comes in the final stretch, with the protagonist turned into a broken doll who practices ineffable choreography with knives on her Instagram account. A pathetic vignette, in the pictorial sense of the word, with which he seems to implore a second chance. "I came into this world naked," she recalls to justify that today she exhibits herself like this on her social networks: it is not to eroticize herself once again, as she did as a teenager, but to return to that primal moment when everything was still possible. And so it sails on, like a ship against the current, incessantly returning to its baleful present.
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