Britney Spears recalls feeling like a ‘child-robot’ under conservatorship in new memoir
By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — Britney Spears is owning her narrative.
In an exclusive interview with People magazine to promote her forthcoming memoir “The Woman in Me,” Spears talked about feeling ready to open up about her life story.
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,” she told the publication. “After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life.”
Spears’ 13-year conservatorship ended in November 2021, giving her back power over her financial and medical decisions.
One of her choices was to write the book. She said it’s been hard to revisit dark moments in her life, including “not getting a moment of peace, the judgments from strangers who don’t even know me, having my freedom stripped away from me by my family and the government [and] losing my passion for the things I love.”
People shared some excerpts from “The Woman in Me.”
Spears, now 41, writes about not feeling like she treated as an adult under her conservatorship.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot,” the excerpt from her book reads. “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Spears also writes of the the “soul-crushing” years when she lacked personal autonomy, writing that she felt “like a shadow of myself.”
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom,” Spears writes. “There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
“The Woman in Me” is due out on Oct. 24.
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