She was once the biggest pop star in the world. But Britney Spears’ autobiography shows that behind the shiny facade it was often dark and gloomy. The star was able to read the book in advance.
It starts off well when she talks about her childhood and Kentwood, this nest 140 kilometers north of New Orleans. “The kids all ran around in similar clothes and all knew how to fire a gun,” she writes. Remarkable to remember something like that. But there probably wasn’t much else in the dreary province of this town of 2,000 inhabitants, which was so boring that the people there didn’t even give their streets names, just letters and numbers, Avenue A or B and 11. or 12th Street. Just once a year, before Thanksgiving, people would dress up in old Southern uniforms and reenact the Civil War nearby at Camp Moore, puff, puff. The time was always nice, she writes, because there was warm cocoa at home and the fireplace was burning.
Britney Spears: “The Woman in Me. My Story”, Penguin Verlag, 279 pages, translation: Sylvia Bieker, Karlheinz Dürr, Astrid Gravert, Karsten Petersen, Anke Wagner-Wolff, 25 euros
© Gallery Books / Picture Alliance
This was the world in which Britney Jean Spears, born in 1981, grew up, and you’re only a few pages into her newly published biography “The Woman in Me” when the comfort of the cocoa and the fireplace suddenly disappears, like everything else , what you could perhaps call a carefree childhood. Instead, there is a drinking father, a welder by profession and a temporary gym owner, a business failure and mentally unpredictable. “I was particularly scared when I went to Dad’s Had to get out of the car because he kept talking to himself while driving. “I didn’t understand the words he spoke,” writes Spears. “In my family, everything could go wrong all the time.”