They say celebrities are frozen at the age they become famous. For Britney Spears that would be October 23rd, 1998, at 16 years of age. Spears had been in theatre productions and a TV show called the Mickey Mouse Club before then, but it was the release of hit single …Baby One More Time that catapulted the teenager to international superstardom over night. This, I imagine, would be an emotionally challenging thing to navigate for a hardened adult. For a teenage girl – already awkward, full of contradiction, earnest, mercurial – it is life-shattering.
This ought to be the takeaway of Britney Spears’s newly released memoir, The Woman In Me. In it she details her tragically predictable childhood: an alcoholic father and unpleasant mother pushing her to the limit in adolescence. From there she documents her failed relationships, her near-cosmic fame, her proclivity to drink and party, her stints in rehab, until she was placed under conservatorship – whereby control of her finances, medication, and even her diet was ceded to the father she so despises.
In 2021 a judge released Spears from this 13-year-long legal relationship. And now, this memoir is Spears’s bid to explain how she got there, as perhaps one of the most persecuted women in America.
Celebrity destroyed Spears. She was forced into premature adulthood: dressed in suggestive outfits; putting on promiscuous performances; working harder than most adults; financially supporting her family. But all the while her mind slowly regressed to childhood. She admits that after she was left by her husband, separated from her children, and mourned the death of a relative she became increasingly mentally juvenile. But that was by her mid-20s. In fact, this process was kicked into gear the moment she became a star. The weight of the contradiction – to be a child dressed as an adult, to be both sides of the “Madonna and whore” archetype at once – broke something in her. Even the prose in her book (reportedly ghostwritten) casts Spears, now 41, as a well-spoken preteen.
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When we talk about the Britney phenomenon a lot of time is spent dwelling on the excesses of noughties celebrity culture. The suggestion is that she was a victim of the Hollywood machine; that she would have been fine had it not been the way we treated her. True, perhaps. The celebrity industrial complex was terrible: journalist Diane Sawyer humiliated Britney in an infamous interview; she talks of men and television hosts leering at her tiny teenage frame as she performed; paparazzi stalked her like prey, driving her closer to the precipice of madness. No one would ever deny the depth of the maltreatment of this woman.
We shouldn’t make children famous. In fact, I left the book thinking in even stronger terms: what parent, in their right mind, could ever want this for their child?
But none of this would have ever happened had her parents and management not sought to make a 15-year-old the biggest star in the world in the first place. This book acknowledges the media’s depravity in how it covered Spears’s life. But it ought to force another reckoning too: we shouldn’t make children famous. In fact, I left the book thinking in even stronger terms: what parent, in their right mind, could ever want this for their child?
Spears suggests that some people are better at navigating celebrity than others. That is evidentially true. But it is hard to imagine any child escaping stardom unscathed, not least a teenage girl. Feminine adolescence is already – for want of a better word – a nightmare. Young girls are famously highly disposed to deathly eating disorders; perilous infighting and entrenched social hierarchy; recent CDC data even suggests that teenage girls are the most anxious and miserable demographic in America. Thrust that under the microscopic lens of the media and sprinkle in overweening and unpleasant parents and it is no wonder that Spears became permanently frozen in time.
Hidden in this memoir – between the accounts of her conservatorship, her fear of the paparazzi, her love of performance, her bitter enmity towards her father – is a serious manifesto: it is wrong to make children famous. Spears is a perfect case study. So why do we still do it?