With grandiosity and rue ... In its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens ... These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes ... Reading the book can feel — this is a good thing — like mainlining the sugar at the bottom of a Sour Patch Kids box.
Incredibly entertaining and frequently insane ... Waiting for Britney Spears isn’t strictly a nonfiction account. It’s a throwback to the days of Hunter S. Thompson-like gonzo journalism, a kinetic, extravagantly written fever dream that lands somewhere between a memoir and a roman à clef. True in vibe, if not necessarily in detail ... Feels as vividly real as any documentary account ... With great sympathy, Weiss recounts her devolution from an animated and sweet southern teen to a finger-snapping, assistant-terrorizing hellion clutching her tiny dog for comfort to, eventually, an empty-eyed zombie, submitting to an involuntary psychiatric evaluation ... During one of the book’s most poignant passages, Weiss recounts Spears becoming trapped by photographers inside a Malibu Starbucks, pregnant, disoriented and terrified, clutching her newborn ... The Britney of Weiss’s recounting, which ends as her conservatorship begins, is a more 3D Britney than the one in her own, somewhat mechanical 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me.
While [Weiss] and I probably agree on the raw merits of his book (a master class in gonzo journalism, an immediate cultural artifact, an iconic Künstlerromanic tear), I’m not sure I share his cynicism. Maybe I was too young during Britney’s rise and fall, but I actually found the book inspiring, full of a hope of the more Occupy Wall Street variety—that is, genuine, or at least respectable ...
More than an incredible and uniquely intimate account of Britney’s dismantlement by the paparazzi, Waiting dares to speak about coming-of-age in the bust of the dot-com boom: it sucked ... Weiss writes with the effortless panache of the smartest sot at the bar, spitting hard truths and saliva with impressive reach. I ignore the spit, the unbelievability, because I’m enraptured, assured by his sensory and emotional vividness that regardless of what’s real, it’s all more or less true. Drunk words, sober thoughts, whatever. This feels particularly overdue in the case of Britney, the fastidious documentation of her life having come at the direct expense of her health and sanity ... Waiting is aware of this cultural torpor and responds with thrilling literary exuberance, mimicking the feverishness we came to expect of a story hot off the press. I could not put it down; I had to know what happened next, even when I already knew. But beyond being a damn good story, Waiting’s major accomplishment is its ability to enthrall without a sacrificial lamb—or woman. Weiss shades the witch’s burnt corpse in the most sympathetic light, granting her something like a proper burial. He feels bad for his contribution to Britney’s conflagration yet atones without miring himself, or us, in self-flagellation. Waiting feels like a rite of passage to that realm that waits beyond, a canoe papier-mâchéd by all the forgotten tabloids to cross the River Styx. Looking back is canonically not the answer. The only way out is through, and what better way through intrapersonal strife than forgiveness? Since it’s not coming from Britney—neither Weiss nor anyone else is getting that—it can at least come from himself ... Down to the line level, Waiting is a fun house for language, mirrors throwing back words that have been warped with new and inventive meanings yet are nonetheless crystal clear. 'Medellín slalom' for railing cocaine? 'Gargoyle' as a verb? Jeff—like Weiss—is singularly imaginative, but more than anything he’s right there, whispering in my ear, a bad bitch with a fat rack and a snake’s tongue. Like the tabloids he helped make famous, Jeff bears all without sincerity, in fact with a voice wet and sour with the poison of irony. I’m never asked to care; I care against all odds
[A] powerhouse ... That the conservatorship isn’t mentioned in Waiting for Britney Spears feels like a glaring omission. Still, it’s a rollicking, wild ride with buzzing energy and plenty of humor.
