Compelling ... She’s well aware of her circumstances, and her memoir reads like a long exhale. As if by chronicling the trauma she’s experienced she is finally able to let it go, or perhaps burn it all down ... It’s not a particularly uplifting read, though relief and rebellion course through it ... Much has been made of the 'bombshell' revelations from this memoir...but vastly more interesting are the quiet revelations about herself ... The second half of The Woman in Me, which details Spears’ years in the conservatorship, reads like a feminist horror story — Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Goth classic The Yellow Wallpaper come to sinister life ... Deeply chilling.
What Spears fills in, in prose that is chatty and confiding and occasionally salty, is the ongoing thrum of family dysfunction and fear ... Throughout the book, Spears repeatedly portrays her relationship to creativity as a kind of pure soul connection, a private communion with godliness independent of outside forces and opinion. Details on the actual salient process of music-making, though, are scant ... The mostly linear narrative in “The Woman In Me” tends to treat these moments and many other well-documented highlights of her career as passing or ancillary, a distant cacophony muffled by the much louder noise of her personal struggles. Still, the facts of it are presented so cleanly and candidly that Woman seems designed to be read in one sitting. It’s nearly impossible to come out of it without empathy for and real outrage on behalf of Spears ... As freely confessional and often furious as it is, The Woman in Me isn’t quite the blazing feminist manifesto that some witnesses to history may have wanted Spears to write, nor the kind of granular, completist portrait-of-an-artist autobiography that others have dutifully supplied in the past. It could be argued, though, that she never stopped telling us who she was.
The buzzy memoir presents the facts of Spears' life in a strikingly straightforward manner, delivering even the most harrowing passages in a casual, conversational tone. By sharing her story in unemotional terms, Spears creates distance between herself and the childish, incapable image of her proliferated by her conservatorship ... Moving ... Moments of introspection are fleeting. The book leaves the reader with the sense that she hasn't yet totally figured out who she is. Ultimately, what is clear is that Britney Spears is a woman recovering from trauma. And we ought to give her the space to do so.
Spears pours out decades' worth of rage and sorrow ... Despite the sadness and anger that permeate The Woman in Me — particularly towards her family — the tone is much breezier than the heavy subject matter ... Readers will come away with a much more profound understanding of both Spears' fragility and the fierceness that has carried her through. We are watching Britney Spears come to know herself, in real time.
To read the rest of The Woman in Me is to be saddened time and time again by the ways Spears has felt hurt, blindsided even, by the opportunism of others ... the details revealed in The Woman in Me disturb even more deeply as Spears illustrates the adolescent-surrounded-by-sinister-adults dynamic.
A reader may come away feeling that her struggle is older, more primal, than our cultural era ... Readers expecting a breezy celebrity memoir will be shocked by the grim opening pages ... No satisfying explanation could ever exist for what Spears went through, and the book’s clear and measured prose—reportedly shaped by a ghostwriter—inevitably will make the reader wonder what’s left out. But the illogic of the story on the page does fit with the absurd weight Spears carried in the public consciousness ... It seeks to close a long and dark chapter.
Anyone looking for starry anecdotes or studio vignettes won’t find them here. Instead, The Woman in Me tells a focused story that makes inarguable the ties between patriarchy and exploitation, and deserves to be read as a cautionary tale and an indictment, not a grab-bag of tabloid revelations. After all Spears has lost, the sharpness of her perspective is a miracle.
Bleak, relentless and angry, a portrait of a woman no longer in the eye of the storm but surveying, dazed and indignant, the wreckage left in its wake ... Spears seems to remember little of her early fame; anecdotes are often half-told. What she remembers with heartbreaking specificity are smaller, familial slights ... If Spears’s memoir leaves readers with anything, though, it’s the knowledge that she deserves some kind of peace.
Britney Spears’ life is again chaotic, but at least her life is her own. And that’s something no man should ever be able take away from her. And what have we learned? Talk show hosts and paps have expressed regret that they turned the Princess of Pop into a hunted animal, and the object of scorn. We talk about how we all have learned our lesson.
Unfiltered ... Far from a sob story. If anything, it’s a survivor’s story, one that’s still being written even after its 288 pages come to an end ... Poignant.
Short, bittersweet and extremely powerful ... This is the forensically convincing account of the madwoman in the attic of pop. And it is not pretty ... Spears is good at telling offhand anecdotes that make ex-boyfriends and husbands look silly ... A story not about music so much as about the way that women are still routinely mistreated in the music business. That it hasn’t turned into a complete tragedy is a testament to Spears’s essential fortitude of spirit – something that burns off these pages.
The Woman in Me is Spears’s most substantial address to the public outside of social media since she was released from the conservatorship, in 2021. Physically, it is a slight object...and as I read I wondered how it could possibly withstand the enormity of expectations ... Readers taken in by the frenzy may find themselves disappointed. The Woman in Me...is not the last word. It is not even a tell-all. Spears, too, is still searching ... An interesting discrepancy develops in the text. It becomes clear that Spears has limited interest in some of what we onlookers might consider the touchstones of her career ... Spears’s most reflective passages, peppered with clusters of queries for a sympathetic reader, are reserved for her most wounding personal relationships.
Short, bittersweet and extremely powerful ... This is the forensically convincing account of the madwoman in the attic of pop. And it is not pretty ... The Woman in Me is a story not about music so much as about the way that women are still routinely mistreated in the music business. That it hasn’t turned into a complete tragedy is a testament to Spears’s essential fortitude of spirit – something that burns off these pages.
A compelling — and devastating — read ... [Spears] writes with acute self-awareness ... Despite those dark chronicles, the book is not all doom and gloom. At times, Spears writes with humor.
Though her anger is clear, Spears is rarely bitter and surprisingly understanding ... The sensationalist headlines about The Woman in Me’s various revelations do Spears a disservice. There are stories that have been private until now, but they are told only in service to the larger points: that trauma begets trauma, that creativity cannot thrive without freedom – and that love should be given freely and without strings.
