Anyway, here's what I learned from the book about the princess of pop, who has had a career impressive enough to actually be considered one of the queens of pop.
- As a kid, she would walk around the woods behind her house in Louisiana, which generated a lifetime love of nature, to escape her awful homelife of fighting parents and an alcoholic father. Her town of Kentwood was near a Confederate training base founded by Jefferson Davis where there are still regular Civil War reenactments and everyone in her little community knew how to shoot a gun.
- She comes from a long line of tragedy, with her grandmother on her dad’s side having shot herself to death on her infant son’s grave in 1966. But her grandmother on her mom’s side was apparently lovely, from Britain, and played instruments along with everyone else in the family.
- Despite early signs of her dad’s alcoholism, he worked hard to open a gym in town that became successful. But while Britney always felt in control as she constantly entered talent contests and even tried out for the Mickey Mouse Club in Atlanta (she and Christina Aguilera didn’t make the cut at first because they were too young), she always felt like her family was the one thing she couldn’t control at all.
- You might stereotypically think of high-school Britney as a cheerleader, but she was actually a tiny guard on the basketball team who loved to sneak around the opponent, steal the ball, and charge ahead for a layup.
- Soon enough she was back performing, having made the Mickey Mouse Club alongside Aguilera, Keri Russell, Ryan Gosling, and Justin Timberlake.
- Although she had a “beautiful normal” time through high school - she started smoking and drinking at 13 and became promiscuous with the boys starting as a freshman.
- She signed to Jive Records at age 15 and spent the next year in singing booths in New Jersey and Sweden. She was also a bit of a klutz in her short skirts and high heels, once bouncing off a screen door at a bigwig party and watching her table catch on fire at a fancy restaurant the first time she met producer Max Martin.
- The night before recording "Baby One More Time," Britney stayed up late listening to Soft Cell’s "Tainted Love" and hoping being tired would make her voice gravelly and more mature and sexy sounding. It worked. In late 1999, she became the first woman to debut with a #1 single and #1 album at the same time.
- As she started to be a massive star, she also started to get a massive backlash for supposedly setting a bad example for kids with her sexy look. She said, what was I supposed to be doing, “a Bob Dylan impression?” She says she just wanted to dance and have fun and be cute. She was gaining a dumb blonde reputation, even if the true color of her hair was black. She was also starting to take Prozac.
- 2001 was a massive year for Britney, leading up to September 11. She was on Forbes Most Powerful Women list, she went deep into her character in the movie Crossroads and decided she never wanted to act again (except she still does regret not taking a part in Chicago), she performed at the Super Bowl, she had the legendary snake performance at the MTV Awards, and she dueted with Michael Jackson at Madison Square Garden.
- The passage in the book that has gotten so much attention is: after Britney and (especially) Timberlake began to cheat on each other, they stayed together and she thought they would be together forever. She then got pregnant and Justin insisted she have an abortion. It wouldn’t have really been that big of a deal but they (mainly Justin) decided it had to remain completely private. She took the pills at home and laid out on the bathroom floor for hours in pain - complicating what could have been a simple procedure at the hospital. That was the beginning of the end of their love affair. He broke up with her over text. Over that time, she had grown close to Justin’s family and far from her own. When she returned to Louisiana, she found her parents had divorced and her little sister Jamie Lynn had gone from the cutest thing ever to a very bad spoiled brat.
- After Justin, she didn’t date for a while, until actor Colin Ferrell came along. She describes their two-week relationship as a “brawl,” because that’s basically what their bodies did with each other the whole time.
- She moved to New York and lived in a penthouse with a view of the Empire State Building. One night she smoked pot for the first time at a club them came home to look at the stars off her terrace for hours. That’s when she started loving the city. Another time Madonna stopped by and said Britney had a nice view. They became friends and performed together at an awards show where they infamously kissed each other.
- Feeling alone out on tour and having lost Justin and basically her whole family, Britney married an old friend she slept with in Vegas. Her family forced her to get it annulled after 55 hours. Next she met Kevin Federline, who she loved instantly because he was so good at holding her, which was all she wanted or needed. It wasn’t long before she discovered he had two children, one of which was a tiny baby. But that didn’t keep the couple from quickly getting married and having two kids of their own, at which point Britney determined she would take control of her life and duck (despite the still incessant paparazzi) out of public life for the next many months.
- Federline became obsessed with becoming a rap star in his own right. He completely abandoned Britney and their two baby sons so he could smoke weed at the studio all the time. It was like a slow-motion divorce.
The first half of this book is about as easy to read as anything above middle-school level, but it’s touching and very interesting to see the making of a pop star. In the new year, I plan to finish it up - what I imagine will be a second kind of book: one about the unraveling and eventual redemption - maybe - of a pop star.
4 out of 5 stars so far
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