“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy.”
Britney Spears just released her highly anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me, and it’s overflowing with information about her upbringing, family, career, and love life. The most talked about story from the book is probably that she had an abortion during her relationship with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake.
Of course, this abortion revelation is just one of many bombshells dropped in Spears’ tell-all.
Spears’ memoir is available for purchase everywhere you can buy books, but if you’re looking for a cheat sheet, we’ve done the reading already and compiled the most shocking stories from The Woman in Me.
Britney Spears’ abortion: Justin Timberlake “wasn’t happy”
In Spears’ memoir, she shares why she decided to get an abortion during her relationship with Timberlake.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” she writes. “I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
Spears and Timberlake dated from 1999 to 2001.
Spears, who went on to have two children with ex-husband Kevin Federline, says she didn’t personally want to have an abortion at the time. “If it had been left up to me alone,” she explained, “I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father…To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Timberlake, who now also has two children with his wife, actress Jessica Biel, has not publicly commented on Spears’ story.
We compiled everything else Spears said about Timberlake in her book right here.
Spears shares stories of her parents’ drinking habits
Spears doesn’t just provide insight into her romantic relationship, she also shares startling details of her parents’ drinking habits, which led to her developing a relationship with alcohol when she was only in middle school.
“For fun, starting when I was in eighth grade, my mom [Lynne] and I would make the two-hour drive from Kentwood to Biloxi, Mississippi,” Spears writes, “and while we were there, we would drink daiquiris. We called our cocktails ‘toddies.’ I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then. The way we drank was nothing like how my father [Jamie] did it.”
Spears described her father’s personality, while he was drinking, as “more depressed and shut down.” It was a stark difference compared to how Spears felt when she drank with her mother. “We became happier, more alive and adventurous,” she says.
Neither Jamie nor Lynne Spears have yet responded publicly to this story.
Spears claims she almost got the female lead in The Notebook
Perhaps the happiest (and most bizarre) revelation from the memoir is this one: Spears says she was almost cast for the lead part in The Notebook. Yeah, you know the one: That infamous Nicholas Sparks love story that led to an equally infamous on-screen romance between Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.
“Filming [my movie Crossroads] wasn’t easy for me,” Spears writes. “That [film] was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved.” Except, she noted, for one other movie, which might have caused her to dust off her acting shoes one more time.
“The Notebook casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams,” she claims, “and even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Club, I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone, I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”
How the conservatorship “crushed” Spears’ spiritual and musical life
In the latter half of the memoir, Spears dives deep into her experience of being put under a conservatorship, which was managed by her father. (You can read more about the alarming details of Spears’ conservatorship here.)
On a number of occasions, Spears lamented the profound irony of this conservatorship. Namely, that a group of people decided she was not mentally capable of performing basic activities (like leaving the house on her own) and making standard adult decisions (like choosing what kind of birth control she wanted), and yet was somehow deemed capable of performing several nights a week at her Las Vegas residency. “[They said I was too] sick to choose my own boyfriend,” she writes, “and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week!”
It wasn’t just the logistical aspect of the conservatorship that was confounding to Spears. She also divulges the emotional and spiritual toll the conservatorship took on her.
“My music was my life,” she says, “and the conservatorship was deadly for that. It crushed my soul.”
Spears had no control over her diet or her finances while she was under the conservatorship
According to Spears, she had no control over her diet whatsoever while she was living under her conservatorship. “No matter how hard I dieted and exercised, my father was always telling me I was fat,” she says. “He put me on a strict diet.”
For years, Spears says, she ate nothing but chicken and steamed vegetables. The conservatorship paid for a chef, and when Spears would ask that chef for “real food,” he would respond that he couldn’t, because he was working under “strict orders” from her father.
As if that weren’t enough, Spears was also put on a strict financial budget, and only had access to $2,000 a week — but even that money couldn’t be spent on just anything. Her conservators had the right to decline purchase requests.
“This was despite the fact that I did 248 shows and sold more than 900,000 tickets in Vegas,” she notes. “Each show paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Spears speaks on new music
One of the biggest questions about Spears’ future, now that she has broken free of her conservatorship and published this book, is what’s next for her performing career.
“I keep getting asked when I’m going to put on shows again,” Spears says in the book’s final portion. “I confess that I’m struggling with that question. I’m enjoying dancing and singing the way I used to when I was younger and not trying to do it for my family’s benefit, not trying to get something, but doing it for me and for my genuine love for it.”
If you’re holding out for a new album, you might not want to hold your breath. “Being an entertainer was great, but over the past five years my passion to entertain in front of a live audience has lessened,” she says.
So what will she do next?
“Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” she writes. “Right now it’s time for me to try to get my spiritual life in order, to pay attention to the little things, to slow down. It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”
If you think these are all the bombshells you can find in Spears’ book, you are very, very wrong. There’s pretty much a whole memoir left to read, still. If you haven’t smashed that order button yet, you might want to now.
