You know how it's often a bad sign when a blockbuster movie is in production and someone new is brought in to do script re-writes? This slim book had three separate ghostwriters. Three! Finding that out explained a lot.

Look, I'm very glad that Britney Spears has escaped what was clearly an abusive legal conservatorship and that she is now better able to live her life on her own terms, but this is not a well-written book. It didn't feel like I was reading about the traumatic experiences Spears has had, and her reflections on them, so much as a manifestation of that trauma. There's no analytical depth here, but in a way that felt less like Spears was boundary keeping and more that she just doesn't have the emotional maturity needed for true self-reflection. She's a woman in her 40s but she sounds like a teenager. The writing is repetitive and contradictory, and while it's great that Spears feels more capable of sharing her own perspective and experiences, she comes across as a fairly textbook example of an unreliable narrator.

Spears also needs to have some friend around her who can say "Girl, no." Who thought that, after all of the Crazy Britney media narratives of the '00s that this book is trying to refute, it was a good idea for her to publish a memoir in which she says things like "I've always been almost disturbingly empathic. What people are feeling in Nebraska, I can subconsciously feel even though I'm thousands of miles away"? Girl, no.

(Justin Timberlake: Christ, what an asshole.) ( )

Britney did a great job telling her story, from childhood through her conservatorship. I am glad that Britney is finally free to live her life and is no longer under the thumb of her family.

I also learned that she has a brother, who knew!?! ( )

Do I love Britney? Yes absolutely. Did I learn a lot about her experiences and her emotions throughout her life including the trauma she endured? Yes and it was incredibly eye opening. Was it my style of writing? No and that’s what had me stuck. It felt more like a conversation, which would be better if I had listened to an audiobook rather than reading a physical copy. But I still love Britney nonetheless. ( )

Heartbreaking. ( )

Let me first say that I honestly had an open mind going into this one. I didn't have a strong feeling one way or another regarding Britney Spears and I haven't really followed her chronicles in the media other than to know a few basic things that stuck out in my head: her obvious rise to fame in the late 90s, a history with the Mickey Mouse Club, a stint with Justin Timberlake, a *very* brief marriage resulting from an impulsive decision in Vegas, another impulsive decision when shaving her head bald, and then some odd control thing with her parents. I liked her early music and I could see her appeal -- she is/was a beautiful girl and she knew how to command attention on stage. And so I was curious to read her memoir.

But this was a train wreck, and I'm not talking about Britney's life (which might also fit that description). For some reason there are a lot of high-rated reviews for this book, and based on that, I had no idea what I was getting into. I rarely, if ever, rate a book as low as I'm rating this one, but...yikes. I'm not sure where to start. Britney supposedly had a ghost writer assist in this book's writing, but for the life of me I cannot see how this made it past all the editors. The writing is so poor -- it reads like a 13-year-old's diary. Britney is very back & forth in her writing, repetitive, contradictory, shallow, choppy.....it's very incohesive and immature and I am guilty of a lot of eye-rolling. Despite the relative short length and "easy" reading, it took me a long time to get through this. I know that Britney's been through a lot. It can't be easy for anyone who rises to fame quickly, esp. at a relatively young age who becomes a victim of the media and those who try to exploit her. I have no doubt that her family, esp. her father, took advantage of her via the conservatorship. But I also have to wonder if maybe in some ways it was indeed for her own good. She did (and does currently) seem to be out of control in a lot of ways, with some questionable mental instability and definitely some poor decision making. The last portion of the book, dealing with the conservatorship and the aftermath, was especially hard to get through. Lots of repetitive self-pity. I know there are two (or more) sides to every story, but I don't feel that Britney did herself any favors in releasing this book. The least she could've done was to let someone else write this for her. ( )