Subterms
You might have heard: Taylor Swift cannot be stopped. Her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sold 2.6 million copies in its opening week last month, earning Swift her eighth Billboard No. 1 album since 2020. At the Grammy Awards in February, she became the first artist to win album of the year for a […] More
Terms were not disclosed. The parties had been arguing over the payment of legal fees and James P. Spears’s financial oversight as his daughter’s conservator.More than two years after a judge ended the conservatorship that had given James P. Spears control of his pop star daughter’s life, Britney Spears and her father have settled their outstanding legal dispute over the payment of his legal fees and his management of her finances.The terms of the settlement were not disclosed in court filings made by both parties in Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday. But the two sides had been at odds over the size of Mr. Spears’s legal fees and questions about his oversight of her money as conservator.Ms. Spears’s 13-year-long conservatorship, which began in 2008 after a series of public breakdowns, was terminated in 2021. Her father, who served as one of her conservators for its duration, had been seeking court approval for more than $2 million in fees to multiple law firms he had hired in that capacity. He had also sought payment of his current lawyer’s ongoing legal bill.Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, had objected to the fees.Mr. Rosengart argued that, in particular, his client should not have to pay her father’s current legal bills, asserting in court papers that Mr. Spears had paid himself $6 million, improperly surveilled his daughter and engaged in financial misconduct during his tenure.Mr. Spears has denied any wrongdoing. He held control over both Ms. Spears’s financial and personal affairs until September 2019, when he resigned as her personal conservator citing health issues, and was replaced by Jodi Montgomery, a professional in the field. A lawyer, Andrew M. Wallet, served as a co-conservator of her estate until he resigned in 2019.Alex M. Weingarten, a lawyer for Mr. Spears, said he could not discuss the terms of the settlement because they are confidential but he agreed that the parties had resolved all outstanding issues. One of the filings stated that his client “is fully and finally discharged as Former Conservator of the Estate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
El libro de la estrella del pop es una obra colectiva. Otros tres autores participaron.“Si me sigues en Instagram, pensabas que este libro iba a estar escrito con emojis, ¿no?”, escribe Britney Spears al final de su libro de memorias, La mujer que soy.Britney Spears ha declarado que completar el libro publicado hace poco —un relato de su periplo desde Luisiana hasta la cima de las listas de éxitos del pop y una tutela que le negó el control de su carrera y sus finanzas— requirió una enorme cantidad de terapia. Y para llevar la historia al papel, contó con la ayuda de “colaboradores”, como ella los llama en los agradecimientos del libro.“Ustedes saben quiénes son”, escribe sin dar nombres.Según dos personas cercanas al proyecto, que hablaron bajo condición de mantener su anonimato porque no estaban autorizadas a declarar públicamente, tres escritores —todos autores de éxito por derecho propio— colaboraron de manera significativa con el libro de memorias de Spears.Ada Calhoun, autora de cuatro libros de no ficción, entre ellos Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, ayudó a crear el primer borrador, dijeron las dos personas. Sam Lansky, exeditor de la revista Time, autor del libro de memorias The Gilded Razor y de la novela Broken People, fue el siguiente en unirse al proyecto. El libro se completó con la ayuda de Luke Dempsey, un escritor fantasma y editor que ha publicado libros bajo su propio nombre y trabajó con Priscilla y Lisa Marie Presley en Elvis by the Presleys.Ada Calhoun fue parte del equipo que le brindó ayuda a Spears con sus memorias.Laurel Golio para The New York TimesEs práctica habitual que los famosos colaboren de cerca con autores de probada valía cuando deciden contar su vida, afirmó David Kuhn, codirector ejecutivo de la agencia literaria Aevitas Creative Management.“¿Cuánta gente crees que trabaja en un libro de memorias presidenciales, o en uno de los libros de Michelle Obama?”, preguntó Kuhn, que ha representado al autor ganador del premio Pulitzer Liaquat Ahamed y a la comediante Amy Schumer. “Porque si eres Michelle Obama, parte de lo que creo que pedirás de tu colaborador o de tus editores son diferentes perspectivas de diferentes lectores”.“Podrías querer la opinión de una persona de 30 años”, añadió, “porque quieres que los de la generación milénial se sientan identificados con el libro. Puede que quieras que un editor masculino ofrezca su perspectiva, porque quieres que atraiga en la medida de lo posible a un público masculino, además del público femenino más obvio”.Así pues, la creación de La mujer que soy no fue muy distinta de la de éxitos pop contemporáneos, que suelen contar con aportes de numerosos colaboradores.La columna Page Six del New York Post fue la primera en informar, en febrero de 2022, la noticia del “gran acuerdo” para el libro de memorias de Spears. Fue adquirido por Gallery Publishing Group, un sello de Simon & Schuster que ha llevado a muchos artistas y personalidades a las listas de los más vendidos, entre ellos Chelsea Handler, Tiffany Haddish, Olivia Newton-John y Omarosa Manigault Newman.Spears agradeció a “colaboradores” en sus memorias sin aportar nombres. Gallery Books, vía Associated PressUna de las principales personas implicadas en la adquisición, según tres personas con conocimiento de la operación, fue Cait Hoyt, agente literaria de CAA, quien es mencionada en los agradecimientos del libro. Otra figura clave fue el abogado Mathew Rosengart, socio del bufete Greenberg Traurig, que ayudó a Spears a librarse de la tutela en 2021. (Hoyt y Rosengart no hicieron comentarios).Tras la firma del acuerdo, Spears viajó a Maui, un viaje que documentó en Instagram. Mientras estaba allí, escribió extensamente sobre su vida en cuadernos y se reunió con Calhoun para una serie de entrevistas largas, dijeron las dos personas cercanas al proyecto. El borrador que Calhoun ayudó a elaborar se completó en primavera, poco antes de que Spears se casara con el actor y entrenador personal Sam Asghari en una ceremonia en su casa de Los Ángeles. (Calhoun no respondió a las peticiones de comentarios).A Spears le pareció en un momento que la voz del libro no se parecía lo suficiente a la suya, según una persona cercana al proyecto. Entonces apareció Lansky, cliente de Hoyt, cuyos dos libros fueron publicados por Gallery.Los antecedentes de Lansky parecen haberlo hecho idóneo para el proyecto. Hace una década, escribía para el sitio web musical Idolator, donde ejercía de “apologista residente de Taylor Swift, entusiasta de las divas y monstruo del sarcasmo”. En su libro de memorias, The Gilded Razor, dice sentirse “atrapado en algún lugar entre un niño y un adulto: lo bastante adulto como para hacer las cosas bien de vez en cuando, pero lo bastante joven como para no saber que eso no siempre sería suficiente”.Esas palabras también podrían describir a Spears, que empezó a trabajar en el mundo del espectáculo a los 10 años y lanzó la canción “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” a los 20. Antes de sumergirse en el proyecto, Lansky hizo otra ronda de entrevistas con ella a través de Zoom y por teléfono, dijeron las dos personas. (Lansky no hizo comentarios). Sam Lansky, autor de dos libros, trabajó en las memorias el verano pasado. Jeff Spicer/Getty Images para Atlantis The RoyalEn otoño, Dempsey se unió al proyecto, aseguraron las personas. Una colaboradora constante durante todo el proceso fue Lauren Spiegel, editora de Gallery que fue responsable del libro éxito en ventas de Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody. (Dempsey y Spiegel no hicieron comentarios).Spears solo ha concedido una entrevista a la revista People con motivo de la publicación de La mujer que soy. No describe los pormenores de ser autora por primera vez, pero tiene claro por qué decidió contar su historia.“Por fin llegó la hora de alzar la voz y hablar claro, y mis seguidores merecen oírlo directamente de mí”, señaló. “No más conspiraciones, no más mentiras: solo yo como dueña de mi pasado, presente y futuro”.Jacob Bernstein es reportero de la sección Styles. Además de escribir perfiles de diseñadores de moda, artistas y celebridades, ha centrado gran parte de su atención en temáticas LGBT, la filantropía y el mundo del diseño de muebles. Más de Jacob Bernstein More
Sales of “The Woman in Me,” which chronicles the pop star’s life, from stardom as a teen to the conservatorship that controlled much of her adulthood, demonstrate tremendous interest in Spears’s story.Britney Spears’s much-anticipated memoir, “The Woman in Me,” sold 1.1 million copies in all formats in the United States in its first week on sale, the book’s publisher, Gallery Books, announced on Wednesday.The early sales number puts Spears’s book in the ballpark of some of the best-selling celebrity memoirs in recent years. In the same time frame, Prince Harry’s memoir sold 1.6 million copies in the United States, while that of Mary Trump, former president Donald J. Trump’s niece, sold 1.4 million when it debuted in 2020.Spears and her team took an atypical approach toward promoting the book, in which Spears recalls her rise to fame as a teenage pop sensation, followed by her years spent in a strictly controlled conservatorship. Unlike Prince Harry, who participated in a series of high-profile interviews to promote his book’s release — including appearances on “60 Minutes” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” — Spears did not do any face-to-face interviews. She instead provided People magazine with sneak-peek excerpts and emailed quotes and promoted the book online to her millions of social media followers.As has been the case with other recent big sellers, the 1.1 million sales figure for Spears’s memoir included purchases of the audiobook. It was read by the actress Michelle Williams, though Spears herself read a short introduction.A news release from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announcing the sales numbers quoted Spears as saying, “I poured my heart and soul into my memoir, and I am grateful to my fans and readers around the world for their unwavering support.”(Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir between $12.5 million and $15 million.)In its 275 pages, “The Woman in Me” includes Spears’s recollections of her childhood growing up in the small Louisiana town of Kentwood, her early years on “The Mickey Mouse Club” and her hard work in the recording studio to produce her first album after landing a record deal at 15 years old. Its most talked-about revelations center on her relationship with Justin Timberlake — during which, she writes, she got an abortion after he said they were too young to be parents. The book frequently returns to the challenges of living under intense public scrutiny, particularly when it came to her body, her sexuality, her relationships and her parenting of her two sons.The book is Spears’s first full account of her 13 years under a conservatorship, which her father, James P. Spears, was granted in 2008 amid a custody battle and Britney Spears’s series of public struggles. A judge terminated the legal arrangement in 2021. In the memoir, Spears describes an adulthood in which security personnel dispensed her medications and put parental controls on her iPhone.Kristen McLean, an industry analyst for Circana BookScan, which tracks book sales numbers, said on Wednesday that Spears’s memoir seemed as though it had a good chance of surpassing one million in print sales in the United States this year. Only one adult nonfiction title — Prince Harry’s “Spare” — has reached that height so far.McLean said the success of Spears’s book was a strong indicator for a robust holiday book market, driven in part by a string of popular nonfiction titles including Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, Michael Lewis’s book about the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir.“It feels like the adult nonfiction market is waking up,” McLean said.Elizabeth Harris More
Three authors helped Britney Spears get her life story on the page.“If you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?” Britney Spears asks at the end of her memoir, “The Woman in Me.”She has said that completing the recently published book — an account of her journey from Louisiana to the top of the pop charts and on to a conservatorship that denied her control of her career and finances — required an enormous amount of therapy. And to get the story on the page, she had the help of “collaborators,” as she called them in the book’s acknowledgments.“You know who you are,” she writes, without naming names.According to two people close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, three writers — all successful authors in their own right — made significant contributions to Ms. Spears’s memoir.Ada Calhoun, the author of four nonfiction books, including “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” helped create the first draft, the two people said. Sam Lansky, a former editor at Time magazine who wrote the memoir “The Gilded Razor” and the novel “Broken People,” was the next to join the project. The book was completed with the assistance of Luke Dempsey, a ghostwriter and editor who has published books under his own name and worked with Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley on “Elvis by the Presleys.”Ada Calhoun was among those who lent a hand to Ms. Spears’s memoir.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesIt is common practice for celebrities to work closely with proven authors when they decide to tell their life stories, said David Kuhn, the co-chief executive of the literary agency Aevitas Creative Management.“How many people do you think work on a presidential memoir, or one of Michelle Obama’s books?” said Mr. Kuhn, who has represented the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Liaquat Ahamed and the comedian Amy Schumer. “Because if you’re Michelle Obama, part of what I imagine you might want from your collaborator or your editors are different perspectives from different readers.“You might want a 30-year-old’s opinion,” he added, “because you want millennials to relate to the book. You might have a male editor offer his perspective, because you want it to appeal as much as possible to a male audience, as well as the more obvious female audience.”The creation of “The Woman in Me” was thus not unlike that of contemporary pop hits, which typically rely on the contributions of numerous collaborators.The New York Post’s Page Six column first reported the news of the “bombshell deal” for Ms. Spears’s memoir in February 2022. It was acquired by Gallery Publishing Group, a Simon & Schuster imprint that has taken many entertainers and personalities to the best-seller lists — among them Chelsea Handler, Tiffany Haddish, Olivia Newton-John and Omarosa Manigault Newman.Ms. Spears thanked “collaborators” in the acknowledgments section of her memoir without naming names.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA principal person involved in the acquisition, according to three people with knowledge of the deal, was Cait Hoyt, a literary agent at CAA, who is thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. Another key figure was the lawyer Mathew Rosengart, a partner at the firm Greenberg Traurig, who helped Ms. Spears extricate herself from the conservatorship in 2021. (Ms. Hoyt and Mr. Rosengart had no comment.)After the deal was signed, Ms. Spears traveled to Maui, a trip she chronicled on Instagram. While there, she wrote extensively about her life in notebooks and met with Ms. Calhoun for a series of lengthy interviews, the two people close to the project said. The draft Ms. Calhoun helped put together was completed in the spring, shortly before Ms. Spears married the actor and personal trainer Sam Asghari in a ceremony at her home in Los Angeles. (Ms. Calhoun did not reply to requests for comment.)Ms. Spears came to believe that the book’s voice did not sound enough like her own, according to a person close to the project. In came Mr. Lansky, a client of Ms. Hoyt’s whose two books were published by Gallery.Mr. Lansky’s background seems to have made him a good fit for the project. A decade ago, he wrote for the music website Idolator, where he served as the “resident Taylor Swift apologist, diva enthusiast, and snark monster.” In his memoir, “The Gilded Razor,” he writes of being “caught somewhere between a child and adult — grown up enough to get things right from time to time but still young enough not to know that wouldn’t always be enough.”Those words might also describe Ms. Spears, who started working in show business at age 10 and released the song “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” at 20. Before diving into the draft, Mr. Lansky did another round of interviews with her over Zoom and by phone, the two people said. (Mr. Lansky had no comment.)Sam Lansky, the author of two books, worked on the book last summer.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For Atlantis The RoIn the fall, Mr. Dempsey came aboard, the people said. A constant collaborator throughout the process was Lauren Spiegel, an editor at Gallery who edited Anna Kendrick’s best-selling book, “Scrappy Little Nobody.” (Mr. Dempsey and Ms. Spiegel had no comment.)Ms. Spears has given only one interview timed to the publication of “The Woman in Me,” with People magazine. She does not describe the nuts and bolts of being a first-time author, but is clear on why she decided to tell her story.“It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me,” she said. “No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.” More
The singer, who has not given a face-to-face interview since 2018, has avoided traditional public appearances for “The Woman in Me,” which is still finding audiences.In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who released her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were prerelease excerpts in People magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by decades of insensitive coverage, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.In seeking a less public life, Spears has spoken about the constant attention of the paparazzi. Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, via Getty Images“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of news tidbits about Spears.A scene from the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears.In Spears’s own recent comments on the book, she has chided the media for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote on Instagram. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a picture of a cake that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional post reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts Armchair Expert and On Purpose With Jay Shetty, the lifecoach and influencer.The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who released a memoir this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the subject of a joke on “S.N.L.”“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”Spears, left, in an interview with Diane Sawyer. The singer writes in her memoir that the conversation, which focused on her breakup with Justin Timberlake, was “humiliating.”ABCStrauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career, promoted his memoir in 2004.Paul Bogaards, a veteran book publicist who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between $12.5 million and $15 million.)Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer upbraided fans earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She voiced her objections again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.” More
Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:“The Woman in Me,” the new memoir by Britney Spears, which is the first major creative project she’s released since she was freed two years ago from the conservatorship that governed her life and career“Killers of the Flower Moon,” the new Martin Scorsese film — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone — about the tragedies that befell the Osage Nation in the 1920s, as members of the community were targeted for their oil inheritance money and rightsNew songs from Mustafa and Corbin, Lil Tracy & Black Kray Snack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More
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
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
