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      Book Review: ‘If You Would Have Told Me’ by John Stamos and ‘Being Henry’ by Henry Winkler

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      Candid memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos reveal how lucky breaks — and Yale training, and a curling iron — made them into household names.IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME: A Memoir, by John Stamos with Daphne YoungBEING HENRY: The Fonz … and Beyond, by Henry Winkler with James KaplanWhen I worked for a casting director in the 1980s, the most fun part of the job was looking at the marked-up appointment sheet at the end of each day. Because film and TV auditions are intimate, often conducted over a desk, my boss had devised a code by which to secretly rate the sensitive actors sitting just inches away from her: CBNC (close but no cigar), LLIT (a little long in the tooth), and so on.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.So you can imagine my surprise when, after a very chatty young actor known for playing snotty know-it-alls had auditioned one day, my boss abandoned her usual hieroglyphics and simply scrawled next to the actor’s name on the appointment sheet, in all caps, the seven-letter epithet that starts with “A” and ends with “E” and is synonymous with “backside.” Cowabunga!Neither of the smart and entertaining new memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos inspires such odium — even if both TV stars have written books that traffic heavily in their authors’ lesser angels. These foibles elicited differing reactions from me — I wanted to give the adorably needy Winkler the kind of slow-burn hug that would both congratulate and pacify him; I wanted to abandon the businesslike and unidealistic Stamos in a black box theater with Stella Adler until he starts babbling about “making choices” and his “instrument.”Winkler’s essential m.o. in life, we learn, is to try to make everyone love him because his Holocaust survivor parents didn’t. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he got his breakout role as the too-cool-for-school Fonzie on “Happy Days” just six weeks after moving to Los Angeles.Playing the Fonz has been a meal ticket that has yielded Winkler interesting reactions from unlikely sources. “You do not have to tell me who you are,” Marcello Mastroianni made clear. “Finally, we meet,” Orson Welles uttered.On the flip side, Winkler has spent much of his post-Fonzie career trying not to be typecast — an obstacle not made easier by the fact that he didn’t learn he was severely dyslexic until he was 34. Winkler has made up for lost time by branching out into other pursuits — directing, producing, writing children’s books .But Winkler’s bigger obstacle, it seems, has been emotional immaturity: Until he started therapy seven years ago, he had intimacy problems, including not being able to tell his partner, Stacey, that he loved her. (Wonderfully, Stacey, now his wife, writes responses throughout the book, such as “There were times when I thought … ‘Now I have another child?’”)Winkler’s affective shortcomings throw his social anxiety and bouts of verbal diarrhea into high relief. After meeting Paul McCartney, Winkler, hoping to hang out with the former Beatle, called him 10 times without getting an answer; after chattering incessantly at Neil Simon’s house over dinner one night, he spent months summoning the courage to ask Simon over, only to be told twice that the playwright was “busy.” It’s this kind of candor — coming from someone who once duct-taped deli turkey to his shoes so his dog would play with him — that makes Winkler so lovable on the page. Under the juddering neediness lies a mensch: After Winkler had shot his role in “Scream,” he was told his name couldn’t be on the movie poster because the Fonzie connection would create the wrong expectations for a horror film. But, Hollywood being Hollywood, when the film came out Winkler was asked to do press. Which he agreed to. Winkler’s story is also aided by the fact that his deepest work as an actor — on the terrific recent HBO series “Barry” — came directly after the therapy sessions that helped Winkler with his intimacy issues. As my former boss might have written, VTEBNLPBI (very tidy ending, but no less powerful because of it).John Stamos, he of “Full House” and “E.R.” and Broadway, takes longer to warm to on the page. Stamos is blessed with some of Winkler’s candor — he admits to having had two nose jobs and having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. However, it’s hard to rouse a head of steam for a thespian whose raison d’être is to “get famous” and who cops to “trying to achieve sex symbol status.” WIJJ (where is the joy, John)?Such dampening pragmatism seems to spill over even to Stamos’s love life. After saying of one actress more famous than he was that “it wouldn’t hurt to get to know her,” he dated her for almost a year. Later in the book, Stamos confesses that he used to want to partner up with “someone who has a bigger, more exciting life than mine to elevate me” so they’d be “a power couple always in the press,” but, once he started seeing his now-wife, Caitlyn, he realized that what he’d always needed was someone who’s cozy-making — someone who would tell him when he has “too much product in my hair.” Some Stamos fans may enjoy this kind of Malibu verismo, but I found myself repeatedly looking floorward in search of a dog to pet. That said, a few things save Stamos from hanging himself. For one, he’s great with period detail. When Stamos auditioned in the early ’80s to play the thief and urchin Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” he had his mother feather his hair with a curling iron — hair that was already streaked with Sun In. He rejected his father’s Members Only jacket in favor of his mother’s long leather jacket, and tied a yellow bandanna around his leg in homage to Chachi on “Happy Days.” Then he drove to the audition in an El Camino he calls “the El Co.” You can almost smell the Travolta.Second, we can chalk some of Stamos’s apparent lack of passion about acting up to the fact that music — specifically, drumming — seems to be his true love. After befriending at Disneyland a Beach Boys cover band called Papa Doo Run Run early in his career, Stamos proceeded to charm his way into the inner circle of the actual Beach Boys and then to play drums hundreds of times with the legacy pop group during the 1980s and ’90s. These sections of the book are some of its most exciting.Lastly, Stamos is a highly social creature. I enjoyed reading about his mentors, Garry Marshall and Jack Klugman; the charity work he has done with abused and neglected kids; and the strings-pulling that he did on behalf of both his first wife, the actress Rebecca Romijn, and his pal Don Rickles. Similarly, the chapter about his friend and “Full House” colleague Bob Saget, who died last year, is lovely.Speaking of tidy endings: Winkler, it turns out, was an early influence for Stamos. After meeting the affable fellow actor, Stamos decided, “I’m going to treat people the way he treats me.”ALAFWARHC: At last, a friend for Winkler who’ll always return his calls.Audio produced by More

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      in Television

      New Memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos

      by

      Candid memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos reveal how lucky breaks — and Yale training, and a curling iron — made them into household names.IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME: A Memoir, by John Stamos with Daphne YoungBEING HENRY: The Fonz … and Beyond, by Henry Winkler with James KaplanWhen I worked for a casting director in the 1980s, the most fun part of the job was looking at the marked-up appointment sheet at the end of each day. Because film and TV auditions are intimate, often conducted over a desk, my boss had devised a code by which to secretly rate the sensitive actors sitting just inches away from her: CBNC (close but no cigar), LLIT (a little long in the tooth), and so on.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.So you can imagine my surprise when, after a very chatty young actor known for playing snotty know-it-alls had auditioned one day, my boss abandoned her usual hieroglyphics and simply scrawled next to the actor’s name on the appointment sheet, in all caps, the seven-letter epithet that starts with “A” and ends with “E” and is synonymous with “backside.” Cowabunga!Neither of the smart and entertaining new memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos inspires such odium — even if both TV stars have written books that traffic heavily in their authors’ lesser angels. These foibles elicited differing reactions from me — I wanted to give the adorably needy Winkler the kind of slow-burn hug that would both congratulate and pacify him; I wanted to abandon the businesslike and unidealistic Stamos in a black box theater with Stella Adler until he starts babbling about “making choices” and his “instrument.”Winkler’s essential m.o. in life, we learn, is to try to make everyone love him because his Holocaust survivor parents didn’t. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he got his breakout role as the too-cool-for-school Fonzie on “Happy Days” just six weeks after moving to Los Angeles.Playing the Fonz has been a meal ticket that has yielded Winkler interesting reactions from unlikely sources. “You do not have to tell me who you are,” Marcello Mastroianni made clear. “Finally, we meet,” Orson Welles uttered.On the flip side, Winkler has spent much of his post-Fonzie career trying not to be typecast — an obstacle not made easier by the fact that he didn’t learn he was severely dyslexic until he was 34. Winkler has made up for lost time by branching out into other pursuits — directing, producing, writing children’s books .But Winkler’s bigger obstacle, it seems, has been emotional immaturity: Until he started therapy seven years ago, he had intimacy problems, including not being able to tell his partner, Stacey, that he loved her. (Wonderfully, Stacey, now his wife, writes responses throughout the book, such as “There were times when I thought … ‘Now I have another child?’”)Winkler’s affective shortcomings throw his social anxiety and bouts of verbal diarrhea into high relief. After meeting Paul McCartney, Winkler, hoping to hang out with the former Beatle, called him 10 times without getting an answer; after chattering incessantly at Neil Simon’s house over dinner one night, he spent months summoning the courage to ask Simon over, only to be told twice that the playwright was “busy.” It’s this kind of candor — coming from someone who once duct-taped deli turkey to his shoes so his dog would play with him — that makes Winkler so lovable on the page. Under the juddering neediness lies a mensch: After Winkler had shot his role in “Scream,” he was told his name couldn’t be on the movie poster because the Fonzie connection would create the wrong expectations for a horror film. But, Hollywood being Hollywood, when the film came out Winkler was asked to do press. Which he agreed to. Winkler’s story is also aided by the fact that his deepest work as an actor — on the terrific recent HBO series “Barry” — came directly after the therapy sessions that helped Winkler with his intimacy issues. As my former boss might have written, VTEBNLPBI (very tidy ending, but no less powerful because of it).John Stamos, he of “Full House” and “E.R.” and Broadway, takes longer to warm to on the page. Stamos is blessed with some of Winkler’s candor — he admits to having had two nose jobs and having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. However, it’s hard to rouse a head of steam for a thespian whose raison d’être is to “get famous” and who cops to “trying to achieve sex symbol status.” WIJJ (where is the joy, John)?Such dampening pragmatism seems to spill over even to Stamos’s love life. After saying of one actress more famous than he was that “it wouldn’t hurt to get to know her,” he dated her for almost a year. Later in the book, Stamos confesses that he used to want to partner up with “someone who has a bigger, more exciting life than mine to elevate me” so they’d be “a power couple always in the press,” but, once he started seeing his now-wife, Caitlyn, he realized that what he’d always needed was someone who’s cozy-making — someone who would tell him when he has “too much product in my hair.” Some Stamos fans may enjoy this kind of Malibu verismo, but I found myself repeatedly looking floorward in search of a dog to pet. That said, a few things save Stamos from hanging himself. For one, he’s great with period detail. When Stamos auditioned in the early ’80s to play the thief and urchin Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” he had his mother feather his hair with a curling iron — hair that was already streaked with Sun In. He rejected his father’s Members Only jacket in favor of his mother’s long leather jacket, and tied a yellow bandanna around his leg in homage to Chachi on “Happy Days.” Then he drove to the audition in an El Camino he calls “the El Co.” You can almost smell the Travolta.Second, we can chalk some of Stamos’s apparent lack of passion about acting up to the fact that music — specifically, drumming — seems to be his true love. After befriending at Disneyland a Beach Boys cover band called Papa Doo Run Run early in his career, Stamos proceeded to charm his way into the inner circle of the actual Beach Boys and then to play drums hundreds of times with the legacy pop group during the 1980s and ’90s. These sections of the book are some of its most exciting.Lastly, Stamos is a highly social creature. I enjoyed reading about his mentors, Garry Marshall and Jack Klugman; the charity work he has done with abused and neglected kids; and the strings-pulling that he did on behalf of both his first wife, the actress Rebecca Romijn, and his pal Don Rickles. Similarly, the chapter about his friend and “Full House” colleague Bob Saget, who died last year, is lovely.Speaking of tidy endings: Winkler, it turns out, was an early influence for Stamos. After meeting the affable fellow actor, Stamos decided, “I’m going to treat people the way he treats me.”ALAFWARHC: At last, a friend for Winkler who’ll always return his calls.Audio produced by More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94

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      She wrote of peasants, unsung women, border crossers and, most popularly, Martin Guerre, a 16th-century village impostor recalled in a 1980s movie.Natalie Zemon Davis, a social and cultural historian whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures — peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts — profoundly influenced the discipline, died on Saturday at her home in Toronto. She was 94.The cause was cancer, Aaron Davis, her son, said.Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary criticism, as well as meticulous archival digging, Professor Davis both represented and inspired an emerging approach to history in the second half of the 20th century, often by filling in gaps in the historical record with informed speculations based on deep immersion in the period under study.Her best-known book was “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who for several years successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Her book was a kind of follow-up to a 1982 movie by the same title, which was directed by Daniel Vigne and starred Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. Professor Davis, who had published a groundbreaking collection of essays, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France” (1975), was the historical adviser to Mr. Vigne and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière while they were working on the film.But with the release of “Le Retour de Martin Guerre” in theaters in France and elsewhere (it had its U.S. premiere in 1983), Professor Davis recognized that the movie could not convey the nuances of the story and so decided to give “this arresting tale,” as she put it in a preface to the book, “its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past.”Professor Davis’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” is based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Harvard University PressThe book was warmly received. In The New York Review of Books, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called it a “major work of historical reconstruction.”Most earlier accounts focused on Arnaud du Tilh, the Gascon peasant who passed himself off as Martin Guerre. Those accounts assumed that Guerre’s abandoned wife, Bertrande de Rols, had been fooled by the false Martin. They made Arnaud du Tilh “the inventive figure in the tale,” Professor Davis wrote.For her, though, Bertrande was central to the story. “By the time she had received him in her bed,” Professor Davis wrote of the impostor, “she must have realized the difference.” Bertrande, in Professor Davis’s telling, “knew the truth” and colluded in the masquerade until it became impossible to sustain.In the book’s introduction, Professor Davis wrote that “what I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”A scene from the 1982 movie “The Return of Martin Guerre,” starring Gérard Depardieu (in the doorway). The director, Daniel Vigne, is second from right. Professor Davis was the film’s historical adviser. European International, via Everett CollectionHer next book, “Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France” (1987), examined stories that common people accused of homicide told in order to secure a pardon from the king. After 1990, her work embraced outsiders and border-crossers around the world.“Women on the Margins” (1995) presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname. In The New York Times Book Review, the historian Arthur Quinn called the book “a stylishly sketched 17th- and 18th-century biographical triptych” that was “yet another exploration of how the modest in early modern Europe strove to fashion identities for themselves.”Professor Davis published two books in 2000. “The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France” is an anthropological look at how gift-giving and reciprocal obligation helped structure society, and “Slaves on Screen” examined the portrayal of slavery, and resistance to it, in five movies, from “Spartacus” (1960), set in ancient Rome, to “Beloved” (1980), an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel rooted in the American South. Professor Davis said history films offered “thought experiments” about the past, but she criticized their use of fictions that misled viewers.Professor Davis’s 1995 book presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname.Harvard University PressAfter 2001, Professor Davis turned her attention to researching a 16th-century diplomat for the sultan of Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan al-Gharnati al-Fasi, who was kidnapped by Christian pirates in 1518 and taken to Rome. He converted to Christianity and lived there for nine years, writing books for Europeans in Italian and Latin about North Africa and Islam, most familiarly under the name Leo Africanus. He was best known as the author of the first geography of Africa published in Europe, in 1550.Her resulting book, “Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds,” was published in 2006.Africanus, Professor Davis said, had a “double identity and vision, a Muslim curious about Christianity, a North African interested in exploring the world of Rome and Italy.” But hard documentation about him was sparse; to figure him out, she said, she had to develop “a plausible life story from materials of the time.” As she had in the case of Martin Guerre, she speculated about Africanus’s behavior based on the practices in the world from which he came.Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, to Julian and Helen (Lamport) Zemon, both American-born children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in the textile business, and her mother was a homemaker. Natalie was one of only a few Jews at Cranbrook Kingswood, a girls’ finishing school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Although she was popular and successful there, she felt like an outsider, by her account. Enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts, she became involved in left-wing politics, participating in a Marxist study group and protesting racial discrimination. In 1948, she met Chandler Davis, a mathematics graduate student. They married six weeks later. After pursuing studies in social and cultural history, Ms. Davis graduated from Smith with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and pursued a master’s at Radcliffe, where she was exposed to the research techniques of social history.She worked on her doctorate at the University of Michigan after her husband was offered a job there in 1950. But after he was held on charges of distributing Communist literature, the government seized their passports in 1952, preventing her for a time from going to France to pursue her chosen area of concentration, 16th-century French society.In 1954, after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee on First Amendment grounds, Mr. Davis was cited for contempt. He was fired by Michigan and blacklisted. Afterward, the couple, who by then had three children, eked out a living through part-time teaching and journal editing. Professor Davis did not receive her Ph.D. until 1959.Her career, like those of most academic women of her generation, was shaped in part, and stalled, by her husband’s. She and her family moved again, in 1962, when Mr. Davis obtained a teaching job at the University of Toronto.But while teaching part-time, she continued her research, publishing the results in essays and papers and presenting her work at conferences. (“Sometimes I typed with a child on my lap,” she said.) She held a faculty position at Toronto from 1963 to 1971.In 1971, she and a colleague, Jill Ker Conway, shook up Toronto’s conservative history department by teaching a course on the history of women and gender, one of the first in North America. (Dr. Conway went on to become the first woman to be named president of Smith College.)President Barack Obama presented Professor Davis with the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2013. Pete Marovich/Getty ImagesThat same year, at 42, Professor Davis landed her first tenure-track teaching post, at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the first woman in the university’s history department. Four years later, she published her first book, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France.” This strikingly original collection of essays reflected her “remarkable breadth of learning,” one reviewer wrote.Professor Davis moved to Princeton in 1978 and stayed for 18 years, succeeding Lawrence Stone as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In 1996, she retired as the Henry Charles Lea professor of history. She had helped found women’s studies programs at both Princeton and Berkeley.Returning to Canada, she was named a professor emerita in the University of Toronto’s history department.Professor Davis became president of the American Historical Association in 1987, only the second woman to hold that position. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2012 and was presented with the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.Chandler Davis died of a stroke last year. In addition to her son, Professor Davis is survived two daughters, Hannah Taïeb and Simone Davis; a brother, Stanley Zemon; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Professor Davis was a charismatic teacher well loved in the profession. “At conferences and round tables, Dr. Davis is usually the most senior and well-known face in the room,” an article about her in a University of Toronto magazine said, “yet she’ll often pull aside grad students to ask about their work — and how they’re juggling it with family.”In a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, Professor Davis told of how her years of study had given her confidence in the resilience and adaptability of societies.“No matter how bleak and constrained the situation,” she said, “some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future.” She added, “The past reminds us that change can occur.”Alex Traub More

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      in Theater

      Ali Stroker Has Tips for Fellow Sleep-Deprived Working Moms

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      The Tony winner and author talked about the Broadway shows she’ll see once she can stay up late again, and the podcast that comforted her during the pandemic.The actress Ali Stroker never thought she would write a book.“Growing up, I didn’t like reading,” said Stroker, who in 2019 became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award. “Books didn’t have any characters I related to.”But when Stacy Davidowitz, the author of the middle-grade series Camp Rolling Hills, asked to interview her because a character she was working on had a disability and worked in theater, Stroker had an idea: What if they wrote a story together?“That’s what I always tell anybody who wants to do something they’re not sure they know how to do: Find somebody who does and collaborate with them,” Stroker, 36, who lives in Westchester County, said in a phone interview on the way to a rehearsal in Manhattan.Their partnership led to “The Chance to Fly,” a middle-grade novel published in 2021, and a sequel out this month, “Cut Loose!”“I needed characters like this in middle school,” said Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 2.The Broadway star, who gave birth last year to a son, Jesse, talked about the shows she plans to see once she can stay awake past 9 p.m., and the activities and advice that are helping her out in the meantime. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Broadway (Eventually)I have not seen a lot of shows in the past year because mom life, and I’ve usually been asleep by 9 p.m. But I want to see “Sweeney Todd,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Hadestown.”2‘Cook This Book’ by Molly BazThere’s a recipe in this book that I’ve made probably 100 times: the pastrami chicken. It’s so good. She’s coming out with a new book, and my sister and I are going to Brooklyn to get our books signed.3Cookbook ClubThis is something my sister, Tory, started last year. Women from the town we grew up in, Ridgewood, N.J., gather once a month to make a recipe from a cookbook. It’s been nice for me to have a community of moms to talk to and relate to.4Hudson Valley Farmers’ MarketsI live in Westchester, and it’s been so nice having farmers’ markets every weekend. We go to the Ossining and the Pleasantville ones. They make these cinnamon doughnuts, and they’re just to die for.5Accessibility at HomeI don’t want Jesse living in a world where Mommy can’t do things in our very own house. It’s important to model that you can get creative and make accessibility for yourself. For instance, I found a chopping block for our kitchen that’s my height so I can chop vegetables, and we have this induction hot plate that I use because the stove is high.6‘Rent (Original Broadway Cast Recording)’That show is so raw, and that recording is so emotional. Hearing the intro to these songs makes me feel like I’m in middle school again and listening to it in my room on my CD player. It captures for me first falling in love with theater.7‘The Goal Digger Podcast’What I love about Jenna Kutcher is that she’s so relatable. It feels like she’s like hanging out with you. I love hearing her talk about business and finance and all the ways you can elevate your life. She also brings on really cool people to interview. I started listening to her during the pandemic because my husband and I were out on Cape Cod, at the home of a family friend, and I would go for a push every day. It became a comforting ritual at a time when so much was unknown.8AudiobooksI like to listen to Audible in the car, especially on long drives, so I’ve been fortunate this year to have a lot of concerts booked. Two of my recent favorites are Stanley Tucci’s memoir, “Taste,” and “Driving Forwards,” by the TV presenter and disability advocate Sophie L. Morgan.9First Village CoffeeLuis, the [co-owner], and the people who work in this cafe in Ossining, N.Y., are just so wonderful. They feel like extended family. And the scones are so good. They’re fluffy inside, crispy on the outside, they have this amazing vanilla chai icing on top. They’re heavenly.10Taking Cara BabiesNo one can prepare you for what the sleeping situation is with a brand-new baby. But this woman, Cara, who’s a mom herself, has come up with these plans and tips for new parents — when to do naps or how often or schedules. New parents kept recommending her, and it has been so so helpful. More

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      in Music

      Book Review: ‘Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,’ by Staci Robinson

      by

      Access to the late rapper’s journals gives Staci Robinson’s authorized biography a rare intimacy, without delving deeply into his music.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography, by Staci RobinsonLast month, after 27 years, a suspect was charged in the murder of Tupac Shakur. A firecracker and crusader as sharp as he was brusque, Tupac reached megastar status in 1996, when his fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” went five times platinum. Often hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was a magnet for controversy during his life, and became a martyr for hip-hop militance after his death.Though anticipated by those familiar with the case, the arrest may provide long-awaited closure that aptly comes in conjunction with Staci Robinson’s poignant “Tupac Shakur.”The Tupac story has been told many times over, but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac’s many journals and notebooks. Along with scores of interviews, the book is stuffed with photocopies of the rapper’s personal writings. As if tucked between the pages, these hand-scrawled poems, raps and musings provide windows into his mind.For Robinson, this is a personal undertaking. She and Tupac were in the same high school social circle in Northern California, and over time she fielded calls to work on writing projects for him. With Shakur’s aunt she collaborated on “Tupac Remembered,” a 2008 collection of interviews, and was an executive producer on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” the 2023 docuseries about the rapper and his mother.Robinson writes in an introduction that she took up the biography at Afeni’s request in 1999, but that the project was put “on hold” a few weeks after she submitted the manuscript. Called on decades later to complete the work, Robinson spends its pages advocating not only for Tupac’s integrity, but for the spirit of Black resistance he embodied.“He wanted to relay stories that needed to be told,” she writes. “It was time to tell the truth about America’s history, about its dark past and especially about the oppression and disparities that were plaguing communities.”“Tupac Shakur” is a touching, empathetic portrait of a friend. Even familiar stories achieve new intimacy at closer range. And small moments help clarify longstanding narratives, coloring in the outlines of this well-known tale of the actor-rapper-activist who died at 25. The book attempts to contextualize the sadness and paranoia beneath the charisma; throughout his life, we learn, “van Gogh would come to be a touchstone for Tupac.”As in “Dear Mama,” Robinson’s biography sees the rapper’s legacy as inextricable from his mother’s, and the book begins not with Tupac, but with Afeni — her exposure to racism in the Jim Crow South, her arrest in New York as a member of the Black Panthers and her standing trial while pregnant.Afeni, we are told, was the bedrock of Tupac’s moral mission. “Ingrained from birth and into his upbringing were both Afeni’s fears and her dreams for her son — the expectation that he would carry on her dedication to the Black community and the will to help others achieve freedom from oppression,” Robinson writes.The book posits that Tupac inherited an antagonistic relationship with the police from the Shakurs — his mother, her first husband, Lumumba, and Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu. Yet it astutely chronicles his life as a microcosm of the ongoing Black American struggle. Robinson often draws direct parallels between Tupac’s creative life and his run-ins with law enforcement. She notes that he was assaulted by Oakland police officers only weeks after shooting the video for “Trapped,” a diatribe against police brutality; filming on the 1993 movie “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred, was put on pause during the L.A. riots.Black cultural responses to injustice were early fuel for a sensitive, boisterous would-be artist. We hear of him furiously riding his tricycle around the apartment as Gil Scott-Heron plays on the turntable; he “entered a new realm” portraying 11-year-old Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at a Harlem fund-raiser for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.We get what feel like firsthand peeks into his turbulent rise to stardom, too; Robinson recounts how his mother would send Tupac traveling with care packages that included condoms, vitamins, prayer cloths and phone numbers for bail bondsmen.Though there are frequent references to his prolific output, “Tupac Shakur” doesn’t focus much on music, which undersells him as an artistic genius. The book mostly considers his songs as ways to explain his behavior; it is not overly concerned with how they were made or whether they succeeded aesthetically. Lyrics either underscore a caring nature or are vehicles for public controversy.In this way, the narrative plays into a longstanding Tupac binary — the sensitive revolutionary and the hair-trigger thug — though it insinuates the latter was primarily a construction of a sensationalist press. And while offering a valiant defense, Robinson excuses Tupac of many provocations. It spends very little time on his 1994 sexual-abuse conviction, and absolves the rapper in an earlier incident at an outdoor festival that left a 6-year-old boy dead, even though the gun in question was registered to him. It doesn’t even consider that he might be culpable, accidentally or by proxy.Robinson does not stand at a historian’s distance. Her writing radiates admiration, and at times she even speaks on Tupac’s behalf. Even so, this is far from hagiography. At its best, the book feels like a plea to re-examine the world that made Tupac Shakur so angry.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography | By Staci Robinson | 406 pp. | Crown | $35 More

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      Britney Spears Timeline, From the Conservatorship to Her Memoir

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      Before the pop star releases her memoir next week, here’s a look back at her life since the guardianship controlling her affairs was terminated in 2021.In June 2021, Britney Spears spoke to a Los Angeles courtroom, giving an impassioned 23-minute statement about her struggles under the conservatorship that had controlled her personal and business decisions for 13 years.“I’ve been in denial,” she said. “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized. I just want my life back.”It was the first time the pop star, who rose to fame in the late 1990s, had provided a window into her realities of the legal arrangement that her father, James P. Spears, had petitioned for in 2008, citing her public mental health struggles and possible substance abuse. During the decade-plus that Spears was restricted by the guardianship, she performed a Las Vegas residency and released four albums; behind the scenes, she said, she lived in terror and shame, unable to make decisions about her work or her own body.Five months after Spears’s speech, Judge Brenda Penny terminated the conservatorship.Spears embraced her sudden freedom to speak freely, unloading about family betrayal and years of isolation on her Instagram, her main outlet for communication with her fans. Now, Spears, 41, is making her biggest statement yet with “The Woman in Me,” a memoir that will be officially released on Tuesday. In it, she says that since the end of the conservatorship she has tried to “rebuild my life day by day.”“I’m trying to learn how to take care of myself,” she writes, “and have some fun, too.”Here’s what’s happened since the end of the conservatorship — in the public sphere, at least.Spears’s personal lifeWhen Spears gave her emotional speech to the Los Angeles judge, she said that two of the conservatorship’s restrictions that pained her the most were limitations on getting married and having another baby.Several months after the arrangement ended, she married her boyfriend, Sam Asghari, whom she met when he was in her music video for the song “Slumber Party.” The marriage lasted just over a year; he filed papers asking for a divorce in August. (The book does not get as far as the split, mentioning their relationship only in positive terms.)In April 2022, Spears announced that she was pregnant, but the next month, the couple said that she had had a miscarriage. It would have been her third child, after two sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.“I’d been so thrilled to be pregnant that I’d told the whole world,” she writes in the book, “which meant I had to un-tell them.”In the immediate aftermath of the conservatorship’s end, Spears was outspoken on her Instagram about the ways she felt her family had wronged her, but earlier this year, she signaled in an Instagram post that she may be softening, at least toward her mother. Lynne Spears — who, she writes in the book, supported the creation of the conservatorship — showed up at her doorstep, and her daughter appeared to embrace a reconciliation. “Time heals all wounds !!!” she wrote.Tensions between Spears and Federline over their teenage children spilled into public view last year, when the singer’s ex-husband gave an interview in which he said their sons had been unwilling to see their mother. Spears responded by criticizing Federline’s decision to speak publicly about their children; in her memoir, she writes about the highs and lows of motherhood but does not discuss any estrangement with her sons.Her careerSpears last released an album, “Glory,” in 2016; the final date of a limited tour supporting it was in 2018.In her book, Spears says she’s hesitant to jump into making music again, but one person who did entice her back into the studio was Elton John. She says the 76-year-old rocker sent her a video message asking her to collaborate on “Hold Me Closer,” a duet that remixes some of his hits, including “Tiny Dancer.” The recording session took a few hours in the basement of a producer’s Beverly Hills home, she writes, describing the track, which was released in 2022, as the first new song made on her own terms in a long time.“Mind Your Business,” a song with a former collaborator, Will.i.am, was also released this past summer. And a long-gestating Broadway musical about fairy tale princesses fighting for their emancipation that featured her music opened in June, closing a little over two months later. (The singer offered some support to the show in an Instagram post, but she did not attend, and some fans remained leery of a project instigated amid the conservatorship.)In courtSince the termination of the conservatorship, there has been an ongoing legal battle around wrapping up the arrangement that long managed the fortune that Spears had made as an international pop sensation.A judge rejected a request from Spears’s father, known as Jamie, that she be deposed, but he was ordered to sit for a deposition; its details have not been made public. There has been ongoing legal wrangling over some of the accounting from the conservatorship years, as well as over who will pay Jamie Spears’s legal fees.One specific area of dispute involves Jamie Spears’s attempts to secure documents from an investigative firm that accused him in court papers of directing a surveillance apparatus over his daughter’s activities, including placing a “secret recording device” in her bedroom. The singer’s father denied authorizing such a device in a court filing, and he has said for years that his intentions in the conservatorship were always to protect his daughter.Still, the biggest issue at the heart of the case — whether Spears should be in charge of her personal life and estate — remains resolved.“Her civil liberties were stripped away and now they are back, and I think that’s what anyone would want,” Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, said in a statement this week.Moments in the spotlightPerhaps Spears’s most widely discussed public debacle in the past two years involved a rising N.B.A. rookie named Victor Wembanyama.In July, according to Spears’s account, the singer tried to greet Wembanyama outside of a hotel in Las Vegas when a member of the player’s security team backhanded her in the face. She demanded an apology, but the security team denied that she had been hit directly, saying that a guard had pushed her hand off Wembanyama. No charges were filed.The most consistent magnet for attention in Spears’s life, however, has been the singer’s unfiltered and often eccentric Instagram account. Tabloids regularly seize on photos and videos of Spears dancing in her home and posing in various outfits, at times in the nude.In her memoir, she seeks to explain her instinct toward revealing her inner life to fans.“I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses,” she writes. “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture.”Since the end of the conservatorship, the posts have regularly stirred up debate among fans and observers about whether she has the support she needs post-conservatorship. Earlier this year, fans called the police to check on Spears after her Instagram account disappeared, and last month, another call was put in to the police after she posted a video of herself dancing with a pair of what appeared to be kitchen knives. She clarified on Instagram that the knives were, in fact, props.“So unacceptable for cops to listen to random fans and come in to my home unwarranted,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’ve been bullied in my home for so long now…ITS ENOUGH!”In her book, she writes, “Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911.”As some fans fret on social media about how the pop star is handling the effects of being suddenly released from intense, long-term oversight, others insist that this is exactly what the #FreeBritney movement had been working toward: uninhibited free expression.“We always said that we wanted Britney to live her life on her own terms, whatever that may look like,” said Kevin Wu, who started organizing within the #FreeBritney movement in 2019, when fans began to coalesce in opposition to the conservatorship. “I’m trying to live by that and leave Britney alone because I think that’s what she would want.” More

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      Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

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      A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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      Takeaways from Britney Spears’s Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’

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      The pop star’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” recounts her rise to fame, struggles that became tabloid fodder and her efforts to escape a conservatorship that long governed her life.There came a point during the 13 years that a conservatorship strictly governed Britney Spears’s life and career that she gave up fighting it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which is being released on Tuesday.Her father, James P. Spears, had been put in charge of her affairs in 2008 after she was twice hospitalized for involuntary psychological assessments. At times over the years that followed, she pushed back privately, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two young sons won out, she recalls in the book.“After being held down on a gurney,” the memoir reads, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”In the much-awaited 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail store in advance of its authorized release, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloid fodder, her time under the conservatorship and her eventual push for its termination in 2021, when she regained the right to make her own decisions.Throughout, she describes the feeling of being too much in the public eye, too scrutinized, whether by her parents or the paparazzi, or even by the doctors who she says “took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house.” But the story is, by nature, incomplete, referring cheerily to Spears’s post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after a little more than a year.Below are other notable moments from the book.Rise to fameFrom performing her first solo — the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” — at her mother’s local day care to auditioning with Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears tracks her rapid ascent to fame as a child and teenager.When she was 10 years old, she recalls, she was on the show “Star Search,” where the host, Ed McMahon, asked her if she had a boyfriend. After she replied that she didn’t, because they were “mean,” McMahon responded, “I’m not mean! How about me?” She “kept it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes, “But then I burst into tears.”After appearing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided that she wanted to live a “normal life” back in Kentwood, La., until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer whom her mother met on the audition circuit, suggested that she record a demo. She won a record deal at 15, and Rudolph became her longtime manager.Spears performing in 1999 during her … Baby One More Time Tour.Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMounting fame, and attentionSpears quickly rose from a teenager performing at malls to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single: “ … Baby One More Time.” She went on tour with the boy band ’N Sync, and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts asked Timberlake different kinds of questions from the ones that she was asked: “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism ultimately led her to start taking Prozac, she recalls.Spears describes a loving relationship with Justin Timberlake but says she was pained by what she describes as his unwillingness to have a child together when she became pregnant. She had an abortion, she writes.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressBreaking up with TimberlakeSpears recounts her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup — which she said he initiated over text message — as leaving her “devastated” and fantasizing about quitting show business.She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.” She viewed the media as portraying her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”As first revealed in excerpts released by People magazine earlier this week, Spears recounts in detail the decision to get an abortion after she became pregnant while in the relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy,” but that he thought they were too young, leading her to agree “not to have the baby.”After the breakup, Spears says, she felt forced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, during which Sawyer pressed her on what she did to Timberlake that caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a longtime rumor when she says she kissed the choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s unfaithfulness.) Spears recalls that interview as a “breaking point” for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”Relationship to drugs and alcoholTackling the peak years of her notorious stint as a paparazzi and tabloid fixture, Spears writes about her early adulthood forays into partying and nightlife with a sense of disbelief about how they were portrayed in the media.Of her time being photographed alongside celebrity peers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Spears writes, “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” saying that she had no interest in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”Spears writes that during some of her most widely known public episodes — shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car — she was “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody fight with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” she writes. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”Spears adds: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”Spears with her parents. She says in her book that her father, Jamie, became so controlling of her career while running her conservatorship that at one point he declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.”Denise Truscello/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe conservatorshipIn early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed conservator of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an arrangement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even as she returned to work as an entertainer, Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.“I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.” She describes the decision as being made by her father along with support from her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied being an architect of the conservatorship. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an effort to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.”Any pushback by Spears was frowned upon, ignored or minimized, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”Fans in the #FreeBritney movement often showed up outside court proceedings where they urged that she be released from the conservatorship. Spears writes of how much that lifted her spirits. Chloe Pang for The New York TimesFighting back and #FreeBritneyWhile Spears had intermittently pushed back against the conservatorship behind closed doors to no avail, she traces the beginning of the end of the arrangement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she was made to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab.“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”In addition to being prescribed lithium at the facility, Spears says, she was allowed only an hour of television before a 9 p.m. bedtime. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”It was there, in a $60,000-per-month Beverly Hills rehab, that Spears says a nurse showed her clips of fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that was questioning the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”She writes that “it felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service” (including one, “Framing Britney Spears,” by The New York Times). “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”When her father was removed as her conservator, not long before the arrangement was ended entirely, “I felt relief sweep over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.” When she received the call from her new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that the conservatorship was officially over, Spears writes, she was at a resort in Tahiti.But Spears remains raw about the aftermath of the conservatorship, writing of her continued estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”The memoir is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA return to music?While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’s life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.”Throughout her time performing a revue in Las Vegas, Spears writes, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs, like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance.”Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, the singer writes, she does not feel motivated to do so, although she mentions a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears says. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”Sarah Maslin Nir and Chris Kuo contributed reporting. More