It’s Just My Memoir, B*tch

I am a memoirist, a writer who juices the moments and characters in my life as a way to make sense of it all. 

This proves challenging, however, when I consider that I have very few memories from before I turned twelve. There’s a deep blackness in that part of my hippocampus, where the brain stores memory. I often imagine that place within my mind like a never-ending storage unit filled with innumerable servers or cabinets, each accounting for various moments in my life. In the way way back, if you can reach that place, you’ll find just a single floppy disc where those first twelve years should be.

I don’t remember the first concert I attended, which was part of Britney Spears’ “Dream Within A Dream” tour. I was ten.

The little I know is based on an amalgamation of Britney’s tour schedule, a few disposable camera pictures my parents took that night, and bits and pieces of memory my mom and dad have passed on over the years. I was entirely in love with Britney, and I emulated her in my style and artistic choices, so my dad took me to the concert as a birthday gift. My mom thought Britney was “trashy” and not the best role model. She didn’t like that Britney made me want to get a belly button ring so badly that I began wearing my magnetized earrings from Claire’s on my abdomen. (I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was fifteen, so a navel piercing was absolutely out of the question.) 

But even though she made her stance clear—rolling her eyes at the way I covered the floral wallpaper she’d selected for my bedroom with posters of Britney, The Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and N’SYNC—she took me shopping at dELiA*s ahead of the concert. I chose silver pleather bell bottoms, which hugged at my non-existent child hips, and paired them with a pink crop top with a sweetheart cut around my non-existent breasts. I can tell from a pre-concert photo that I’d stuffed my training bra with toilet paper. My top reveals a stretch of skin I smeared with silky, scented body glitter before adding a magnetic butterfly “belly ring.” A recent Disney Cruise had left my hair cornrowed in pink and white beads, a style I chose because I wanted to look like Lizzie McGuire. I kept them for over a month, carefully wrapping my head in a silk scarf each night so they’d last for the concert. I completed my outfit with a pair of metallic light-up Heelys, a choice that left me clutching the railing as I descended our stairs for the concert. Years later, when recounting this scene, my dad will say, ““you lit up like a strip club on Bourbon Street.” But on that day, they didn’t make me change, even after my dad snickered to my mom, “She looks like a baby hooker.” I wonder, Do I remember this or have I been told this story? Memory and memoir writing is tricky in this way. 

Once, while digging around the internet, I uncovered research about childhood amnesia that determined the average age of earliest childhood memories is between three and four. It’s a funny fact to consider as a writer, a memoirist even, that I don’t remember what currently amounts to a third of my life. My parents found it strange and frustrating when I would tell them I didn’t remember major trips we took, ones I’d begged to go on, trips to Egypt, Italy, and Spain. I also don’t remember standing on the stadium folding chair next to my dad and screaming along to “…Baby One More Time,” but he does. I don’t remember his shock at Britney’s costume during “Toxic,” a nude rhinestone bodysuit intended to make it look like she was naked and covered in diamonds. I don’t remember the headlines of my teens, decrying Britney as “crazy” and an “unfit mother” after she shaved her head and began partying with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I don’t remember her numerous public trips to various rehab and mental health institutions. I don’t remember when I first learned about her conservatorship. I was in the midst of my own inner and external turmoils and too close, unbeknownst to me at the time, to what Britney was going through to find any type of comfort in our shared existence. 

I didn’t fully realize the impact Britney Spears’s life and career has had on my life until I began reading The Woman in Me, her debut memoir. The front flap recounts Britney’s June 2021 court testimony and notes that the “impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.” 

The writer Anne Lamott, whose first book was written for her father, who coincidentally had the same type of brain cancer my father survived, says in Bird by Bird, her love letter to the writing process, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

My father and his little sister grew up in Hammond, Louisiana, just thirty minutes south of Britney’s hometown, Kentwood, which sits on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. My dad’s mother, Theresa, lived in the same house my dad was raised in until I was in my teens. I grew up playing in my granny’s rose garden and running wild in the same woods Britney recounts in the first few pages of her book. Our fathers were raised by abusive alcoholic men who hurt their wives and pushed their sons to measure up to their expectation of what a “man” should be. Britney’s paternal grandfather, June, was a local basketball star. My grandfather, Archie, was the quarterback and captain of LSU’s football team. They weren’t far apart in age, my grandfather slightly older than Britney’s. I wonder if they might have known each other. Those parts of Louisiana and the sporting community were small back then, and in many ways, still are.

I was nine when Britney Spears released her debut single “…Baby One More Time” at sixteen. The accompanying music video portrays bored school-girl Britney, and her classmates dancing in the halls, outside, and in the gymnasium after the bell rings. I began ballet when I was three and added tap and modern to my list of after-school activities when I was eight. All I wanted was to sing and dance and to be seen as perfect, a feeling Britney also describes in The Woman in Me. 

One of the many ways I found calm in the chaos of my childhood, alongside reading and writing in my diary, was through putting on performances for my parents and their friends. It wasn’t uncommon for my mom and dad, who had me in their forties, to bring me out to dinner as a source of entertainment and, to keep me from sleeping on or under the table, ask me to sing. Everything felt frosted over in those moments, as if I’d been transported to a different and more deliciously colorful world like Clara in The Nutcracker. I’d belt out songs that were wiser than my years, like “Summertime” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, or “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. My thirst for stardom—or a path that would take me far beyond Louisiana—led me to compete and win the Miss Pre-Teen Baton Rouge and Miss Pre-Teen Louisiana beauty pageants. I auditioned for American Idol, preparing two songs—Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and Roberta Flack’s version of “Killing Me Softly”—for the Idol open call auditions at the New Orleans Superdome, just a year before it filled with Hurricane Katrina refugees. My mom came with me and let me miss a whole day of school. I was definitely one of the younger people in the crowd of hopefuls, and while I didn’t get as far as Britney did when she competed on Star Search, a similar televised competition, I did make the first four cuts at only ten years old. I continued spending all my free time in voice lessons and dance classes, auditioning for local and regional theater productions, and immersing myself in the fantasy of a life in Hollywood or on Broadway. It was this thirst for creative expression that would later translate into a need to detail everything on the page.

The writer Dani Shapiro, a favorite of mine, opines in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life that our stories “choose” us. For memoirists who are grappling with what to share or omit, Shapiro—who has also struggled with these details—says, “If we don’t tell them in order to spare others, we are somehow diminished.”

I think of a woman like Britney Spears, who has been supporting her family since she was a teenager and, in doing so, has lived to “spare” others. And I think of myself and the childhood I lost on a soccer field somewhere in uptown New Orleans when I was eleven—just a few months after I saw Britney in concert—as my dad fell down in the bleachers and began shaking so hard that we could hear him clanging against the metal out on the grassy pitch. Doctors swiftly identified the cause of his seizures as an incurable brain tumor, a glioblastoma, and gave him three to six months to live. One of the few memories I know is mine is my mom grabbing me by my small, bony shoulders in the hospital, tears transforming her face, and telling me I needed to be strong for her. Sometimes, I think of how I spared her by doing just that and, in turn, allowed myself and my mental health to be diminished.

Shapiro goes on about how the memoirist is perceived as “exposing” themselves. But writing in this way would be akin to leaving your diary open for all to read—very different from memoir. She recalls an exchange between Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, and a woman he’d just met. The woman told McCourt she felt as if she knew everything about him. “Oh, darlin’,” he said, “it’s just a book.” 

The Woman in Me is just a book, a mechanism that, unlike an open diary, allows the reader to connect with Britney, and as Shapiro would say, “With others. With the world around you. With yourself.”

I felt this connection in myriad ways while reading The Woman in Me, especially as a child who was also subject to generational trauma. While my father doesn’t struggle with alcoholism like Jamie Spears, his father did, and that disease left its marks on the whole family. My grandfather’s drunken rages—physical and verbal abuse predominantly directed at my dad and grandmother—trained his son to be emotionally closed off. It was often impossible, still is, for anyone to penetrate my father’s porcupine-thick skin. When I experienced significant bullying as a kid, he couldn’t understand or empathize with my pains because his were always greater. As an adult, I know it’s an exercise in futility to tell him if I’m sad because, for him, it doesn’t compute. He tells me to “turn on” my happiness, as he was forced to do. 

More than anything, The Woman in Me encompasses Britney’s palpable loneliness throughout her entire life. It’s an isolation I recognize. I feel it when I recall the long trips my parents took without me. In our kitchen, we had a calendar with velcro stretched across each day of the week. As days passed, I would take the small photo of me and move it one place closer to the date they’d return, affixed with a photo of my parents. There were years where my letters to Santa asked for them to stay home more.

I felt a bleaker loneliness when I was twenty-four and my mother died, which caused my only-child existence to deepen and bleed into the experience of feeling partially orphaned. The gap widened between my father and me, and his need for me to be more of a wife or parent to him than a daughter grew when he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. My mother had hoped and so did I, even, that her death would create a bridge for us to meet on. Instead it left a crater that sunk everything we might have shared. Two weeks after she died, a few days after her funeral, he left me in our home, the place she died in—her personal effects everywhere as if she would pull in the driveway at any moment—and he went on a vacation with friends – ones I’d grown up knowing – to Taos, New Mexico. These plans materialized a day before he left and I was told I was not invited. That weekend Hurricane Harvey blew through the city. When I later told him how his leaving at the precipice of my grief had hurt, he reminded me I was an adult and free to do as I pleased, as was he. These are the scenes I replay when reading Britney’s experience of her conservatorship. How impossible it was for her to get her family to treat her as their equal, with compassion, especially at the heartache she felt at being separated from her sons. My dad has never controlled me in that way, but he made it clear that we were not a team, that I was alone in my grief and should seek support elsewhere.

From early ages, Britney and I turned inward, focusing on fantasies of fame and escaping our families. It was an attempt to control things that felt more within our grasp than our dads and moms. We threw ourselves into dancing, singing, and various auditions that would get us as far away from Louisiana as talent would take us. But there was another pull, the suburbia and church groups of my teenage years creating a fork within me, a divide of disparate dreams that Britney also describes experiencing. Part of me wanted desperately to leave, to eschew all that I was raised around, which my mother—as a fifth-generation New Orleanian—boldly encouraged. The other half of me wanted to fit in with my peers, to go to LSU—my grandfather and several family member’s alma mater—and marry my college sweetheart. We’d have a car filled with kids before I turned thirty. I felt I could be happy in this version of my life and that things could, in many ways, be easier, softer, gentler, and more simple.

I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder as a child. This mostly manifested in fears that my parents wouldn’t come home from whatever dinner party or event they might be at that night, that something bad would happen when they went to the opera—as it happens to Bruce Wayne’s parents. I was afraid of plane crashes that could take them from me. Panicked to the point of being unable to sleep until we were all under the same roof, and even then, each creak in the floorboards of our old house–all caused by the expansion of moisture in the swampy ground our foundation sat on–kept me up with Home Alone style fears of home invasions. 

I overthought most situations and experienced a lot of social anxiety, which I’m told is common among only children. Where my parents were gregarious individuals who loved large social gatherings, I felt more comfortable alone in my room with a book or in the staid routine of daily dance classes and voice lessons. Britney expresses a lot of this, which surprised me because it’s hard to picture your favorite pop star as awkward or socially anxious. We both rarely knew how to articulate these anxieties and instead stayed silent or would isolate ourselves to cope. Few close to us, especially our family, seemed to understand these “quirks” in our personalities. But unlike Britney, I was somewhat lucky that sometimes my mom did. When she was in her late teens until her mid-thirties, she struggled, quite openly, with anxiety and depression. Similarly to Britney’s paternal grandmother, Jean Spears, my mother was briefly hospitalized and placed on lithium. While I’ve never been told whether my mom attempted suicide, I know she often thought about it because she told me she did. I know that when she lived in Paris, from her early twenties until she was thirty-eight, she would wait for the metro, look down on the tracks, and meditate on how fast and easy it would be to throw herself onto them and leave her body. 

In my early twenties, I began experiencing panic attacks. I wasn’t sure what was causing them other than stress. I was studying creative writing at The New School, while juggling several internships. Finances were tight. From time to time, my mom would tell me they might not be able to pay for the next semester, and then my dad would spend what amounted to my tuition on a piece of art, and my mother would threaten to leave him. Rinse and repeat, so I started seeing a therapist and taking anti-anxiety medication. Everything seemed to level out when I was twenty-three. I stopped taking medication, I stopped seeing my therapist, and I moved to London, England, for my first love—a British boy—work and to get my Masters in English literature. But then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, the same type of ovarian cancer Britney’s beloved Aunt Sandra died from, only six months after I moved. Unlike my father, my mother was not a medical miracle. She lost her life quickly over the course of a short and brutal year. Moving home to New Orleans when she died was my attempt to make sense of it all. In The Woman In Me Britney tells of a wild and creative period of her life, shortly following her divorce from Kevin Federline (and before the conservatorship). During this time, she released Blackout, which she feels is her best and most artistically diverse album. She was twenty-five, which is the same age I was when I left New Orleans to spend the year traveling, visiting France, Italy, Monaco, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mongolia. Attempting to heal, I wrote about loss and scattered my mother’s ashes. When I moved back to New York, I threw myself into work at a small publishing house and tried to let my nine-to-five job, friends, turbulent relationship, and life itself cover the pain and grief I felt for the home and family I lost when my mom died. 

But that’s not possible, Britney shows the reader, when her family diminishes the pain she feels during her divorce from Federline. Kevin refuses to let her see their young children, and the paparazzi’s relentless attacks and constant presence in her life bring her to a breaking point–which results in her infamously shaving her head, entering rehab and, eventually, the conservatorship. 

I know that breaking point well. 

I reached it at thirty years old, only five years after my mom died. What I didn’t shed in hair, I shed in weight, losing over thirty pounds in three months. The relationship I’d been in for over a year ended suddenly, and I was heartbroken, but had recently begun a new job with a sizable role and salary increase, and moved out of the house I shared with friends and into my own space. All within the same month. I was trying to stay above the muck of it all, but my sadness suffocated me in my two-hundred-and-fifty square foot Brooklyn apartment. I had moments where I looked at pills that were supposed to ease my depression and anxiety and wondered if taking all of them at once would give me a more permanent sense of relief. After I quit my job, I would lie in my shower for hours, sometimes fully clothed in pajamas I’d worn for days, and I’d put my dad on speakerphone. I tried to get him to comfort me like I hoped a father would. I’d tell him I was scared by how hopeless I felt, and he would tell me to “decide to be happy.” 

Like it was that easy. 

I was placed under a psychiatric hold after I collapsed on my way to work and couldn’t tell the doctors the last meal I remembered eating. My friends and family were shocked at how swiftlyI plummeted from my place of relative stability. Some didn’t know how to respond and distanced themselves from me, others told me I wasn’t present enough to be their friend, my godmother—my mom’s best friend—stopped responding to the texts I sent asking for advice and blocked me on Facebook. Eventually, my mother’s sisters intervened, presenting me with a host of websites for rehab programs, refusing to let me come home for Christmas until I got “help”, and so I spent almost ninety days at a mental health institute designed to treat my developing Xanax addiction, continuing depressive episode, and the malnourishment it caused.

While I’m able to acknowledge, a year later, how this time in my life shaped me for the better, and feel grateful for the remarkable people I met along the way by seeking residential treatment, there are many ways I felt hurt and infantilized. I felt like a criminal when I’d come back inside the house I lived in with five other young women and men, and was forced to do a “contraband dance,” which consisted of jumping around and shaking our shoes out to prove we weren’t smuggling anything unapproved back inside. Or how I had to count aloud or hum when I went to the bathroom or showered, the door cracked wide open, to confirm I wasn’t hurting myself. I still pause before I open a drawer in my kitchen and remember a time when all drawers and doors were locked to me. I know this was designed for safety, but the damage caused from being woken with a flashlight in my face every thirty minutes while I slept left its mark. I rarely sleep more than an hour through the night without waking, expecting to hear whispers and shoes coming into my room and approaching my bed. When Britney recounts her own stay at a similar inpatient program, she articulated a feeling I often share: “I’m probably the least fearful woman alive at this point, but it doesn’t make me feel strong; it makes me feel sad. I shouldn’t be this strong. These months made me too tough.”

As a graduate student, the subject of my final project, a narrative essay, was my mother. It was the first piece of writing of mine that wasn’t about twenty-something romantic love and the hopeless pursuit of it. When I began writing, she’d recently been diagnosed with cancer, and I decided not to tell her about the subject of my essay until it was finished. The piece explored the etymology and history of tulips, her favorite flower, while weaving in the story—as I knew it—of my mother’s life. Comparing her to the flower and the flower to her. It was a love letter and a testament to the beautiful, hearty, colorful woman I knew her to be. I dedicated the project to both of my parents, and mailed them a copy once I’d submitted it for my professors to review. 

A few weeks later I received a short text from my mom. 

“Very nice what you wrote about me, but hurt your dad’s feelings by leaving him out. Write something kind about him, too?”

I was furious at and hurt by her response. I remember feeling like she’d taken something I’d done purely out of love and admiration and turned it into a weapon for them both to use against me. Both my mom and dad told our family about the essay, but not that I’d graduated at the top of my class or received glowing remarks on this project from my professors, that I’d been cruel to my father in omitting him from a story about my mother’s life – a time in her life before she knew him. After that, I decided not to write about my parents – my family – while they were living. When my mother died and I began writing about her, the loss and the way it changed the structure of our family, it was hard to omit my father but I wasn’t sure how to write about him without fearing his response. That fear of repercussions that could – likely, in my mind, would – stem from my words about my inner world was so strong that after I completed my masters degree, I left the dome of literature and my pursuit of a life somewhere in those margins and began working at tech startups. It would be almost six years before I would write outside of my diary again. 

Much has been said about the backlash experienced by both Britney and the public figures she lived her private life with, namely Justin Timberlake and the entire Spears family. On Justin, she’s both matter-of-fact and generous in her retelling of that time of her life and first significant—and wildly public—romantic relationship. They were very young, and while she would have had Justin’s child because she was so deeply in love with him and craved a quieter existence where she could create the family she hadn’t grown up with, he wasn’t in the wrong for feeling like he wasn’t ready to become a father. From Britney’s adult vantage point, it’s easy to spot the perpetrators of wrongdoing—their managers, who were more concerned about damaging her reputation as a virginal pop idol than they were about getting her access to safe healthcare when they decided to terminate the pregnancy in a hotel room. Reading this, I felt less anger for Timberlake—who tried to comfort Britney the only way his immature and self-absorbed pop-star brain knew how to, through song and strumming his guitar—than I did for her management, who had the power and greater maturity to know they should have gotten Britney to a doctor. I don’t think that Britney should have omitted these details from her memoir to spare others.

From my pre-teen years until I became a woman approaching thirty, I felt safest when I hid myself and disassociated deep within a book from the uncomfortable realities of my life. My thoughts and feelings were rarely shared outside of the confines of one of my journals or the Notes app in my phone.  

Britney echoes a similar reluctance to be fully present with those closest to her. She describes how frequently she’d take to the woods surrounding her house and hide.

“For years that was my thing — to hide.” 

We learn as children playing hide-and-seek that staying hidden is one of the ways we remain safe.

Following her breakup with Justin, Britney briefly lives in Cher’s old NoHo four-story apartment, which she rarely leaves. “I fell off the face of the earth.” She writes. “I ate takeout for every meal. And this will probably sound strange, but I was content staying home. I felt safe.”

Towards the end of the book, Britney describes the process of writing all she’s shared with us, laying out the truth of her life on the page for the very first time, as an incredibly freeing and emotional experience—but one that took a long time and a lot of work to feel ready to tell. 

I write because, as a friend once told me after I shared an anecdote from my youth, I had “no choice but to become a writer.” But I do wonder, as Britney does in the second-to-last page of her book, if my family and those who closed themselves to me during the hardest moments of my life, will find and read this essay of mine, and what they’ll think. 

As Joan Didion notes in “Why I Write,” included in her 2021 essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions, I would never have needed to write a novel.” 

When I told my cousin I was working on a piece about Britney’s memoir, I joked that it was also about how Britney Spears and I are the same person. “You have a lot in common with each other,” he said with a straight face. I laughed, and he doubled down, telling me that the only thing that separated me from Britney Spears was, “y’know, her being a multi-millionaire pop star” and the fact that she’s been institutionalized by her family several times. And I’ve only had that happen to me once. I feel lucky that my worries over who reads this essay and feels hurt or angry with me is small, pales in comparison to the reach of The Woman in Me — which sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. I feel lucky that I don’t need to worry much over whether or not what I’ve written will further alienate me from my father, who, even if he does read this, would likely forget the next day. I feel lucky that the private anecdotes I’ve shared won’t jeopardize someone’s career. I feel lucky that I probably don’t need to worry that thousands of people will have opinions about what I have and haven’t already shared here or in my future memoirs. And for this reason, among others, I feel lucky that while I am, as of this year, a “Hollywood girl” living in Los Angeles, this isn’t a song or a story about a girl named Lucky or Britney Spears. This is my story, a writer in my early thirties who, unlike my pre-teen self, feels lucky, fortunate, and grateful to have not gotten further on American Idol, lucky to have parents who wouldn’t move to New York or L.A. so I could be a child star, lucky to be rhythmically challenged in jazz and tap dance – lucky to have traveled a similar yet very different road than that of Britney Jean Spears.