Britney Spears is telling all.
The pop star’s long-awaited memoir, due to hit shelves on Tuesday, promises to correct the record on everything from her earliest days of fame through to the end of her harrowing 13-year conservatorship.
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,” Spears told People via email in a recent interview. “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies—just me owning my past, present and future.”
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Given that seemingly everyone is hungry to hear Spears’ side of the story (except Justin Timberlake, who is reportedly quaking in his boots), it’s only natural that some of the biggest bombshells from The Woman in Me have already found their way into the light.
With a select few copies being pored over and widely reported on, never-before-heard details on Spears’ relationships—with Timberlake, ex-hubby Jason Alexander, and even Colin Farrell—and the biggest moments of the singer’s career (prepare to see her shaved head in a whole new light) lit up the internet on Thursday.
Here are the best of the best of those revelations… so far.
Britney was never as hard-partying as the press made her out to be—but she did have a “drug of choice.”
Spears writes that her whirlwind days alongside the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan in the early 2000s were never as “wild” as they seemed to be when printed up in the tabloids, explaining that she kept her distance from hard drugs and “never” struggled with alcohol abuse, the Times reports.
That said, her “drug of choice” was Adderall, the ADHD and narcolepsy drug. It “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed,” she writes.
She didn’t lose her virginity to Timberlake, despite previous claims.
As Spears transformed from a child performer to a sexy pop star, the media had a strange fixation on the singer’s virginity. In 2003, she told W Magazine that she had only slept with “one person her whole life,” adding that she lost her virginity “two years into [her] relationship with Timberlake.” In her book, however, she reveals that she had sex for the first time in high school with her brother’s childhood best friend.
Timberlake broke up with her via text.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Timberlake both allegedly pressured Spears to get an abortion and cheated on her over the course of their three-year relationship. It’s only fitting that his preferred breakup method (text message) would be just as galling.
The move left her “devastated,” she writes, according to the Times. To add insult to injury, her team then strong-armed her into doing a confrontational interview with Diane Sawyer, which felt like a “breaking point” to Spears.
“I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”
She had a steamy two-week tryst with Farrell.
Spears and Farrell made headlines in 2003 when the Irish actor brought the “Toxic” singer to the premiere of his film The Recruit. In her memoir, Spears recalls being introduced to the former Hollywood playboy the previous year by “a club promoter friend.”
At the time, Farrell told reporters that the two were “not dating.” And Spears said that they had just kissed. But in her book, Spears reveals that she had a two-week-long sexual relationship with the actor to deal with her breakup with Justin Timberlake. “Brawl is the only word for it,” she writes, “we were all over each other, grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight.”
Spears doesn’t detail how things with Farrell ended but writes that “for a brief moment in time” she “did think there could be something more.”
She was “very drunk” and “bored” when she married her first husband Jason Alexander.
“I don’t even remember that night at all,” she writes of the 55-hour marriage to her childhood friend. “But from what I’ve pieced together, he and I lounged around the hotel room and stayed up late watching movies [...] then had the brilliant idea of going to A Little White Chapel at 3:30 in the morning.”
“People have asked me if I loved him,” she continues. “To be clear: he and I were not in love,” she explains. “I was just honestly very drunk and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored.”
Shaving her head was an act of rebellion against the world.
It was the buzz heard ’round the world: In 2007, “out of [her] mind with grief” over the death of her aunt, separated from her children, and going through a brutal divorce, Spears shaved her blond locks down to the scalp. Without getting her side, the tabloids ran rampant with the story, twisting her image into that of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
As much as it was a symptom of a breakdown, though, the buzz cut was also a means of seizing back what little control she could, Spears writes in The Woman in Me.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up,” she explains, according to People. “I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
Her conservatorship made her feel like a “child-robot.”
After Spears’ star was judged to have flamed out in spectacular fashion, a court appointed her father, Jamie Spears, as her conservator in 2008. What followed wholly transformed her life. “I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” she writes, per People.
With security guards watching her every move, “I became a robot,” Spears recalls. “But not just a robot—a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
She learned about #FreeBritney from a nurse in rehab.
Spears claims that her father threatened to publicly humiliate her if she didn’t agreed to go to rehab in 2018. The facility “kept me locked up against my will for months,” prohibiting her from taking a bath alone or even closing the door to her room.
So how, exactly, did she learn about the grassroots movement pushing for her liberation? A nurse showed her clips of protesters and activists agitating on her behalf, she writes.
“That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears adds, the Times reports. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”
The conservatorship also “crushed” her creative spirit.
Feeling “like a shadow” of herself under her father and a lawyer’s near-total control of her financial and personal affairs, unable to even make changes to her concert set lists, Spears gradually lost her love for performing and making music.
“My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul,” she writes, per the Times.
Even more heartbreakingly, even after she was freed from the conservatorship in November 2021, its constriction continued to make an imprint on her life. She writes that she has little motivation to create music these days, saying it’s not her “focus” right now.
Instead, she’s honing in on something just as, if not even more, important. “It’s time,” Spears says, “for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”
