“The Woman in Me,” Reviewed: What Britney Spears’s Memoir Has to Say
Our era runs on biography. Stories—in film adaptations, novels, and pop songs alike—are received as the clarion calls of so many “voices.” The myth of an unencumbered, authentic voice persists. Even if it’s never quite found, we find value in the searching. It was foreseeable, then, that readers would make much of a new memoir from the pop star Britney Spears, whose prevailing story for much of her adult life has been one of silencing.We know the story by now. In 2008, after a series of messy public episodes, zealously documented by the tabloid press, Spears was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility and her father successfully petitioned a California court for a conservatorship, deeming Spears unfit to make personal and financial decisions on her own behalf. But Spears did not disappear ...