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I I don’t remember much about my middle school days, but I do remember the exact moment I told someone that Britney Spears would soon die. This was 2008, shortly after Spears died. Taken out of her home on a stretcher and taken to a psychiatric hospitalAnd these words came out of my mouth so fast that I remember being shocked by them. I guess I believed it. Or maybe I just wanted to show off – not my absolutely non-existent precognitive powers but the fact that In factFellow classmates, only I could truly understand the gravity of what was happening. We’ve all watched Spears transform from pop cultural zygote in a schoolgirl outfit to sexy MTV temptress to angry, fragile wreck surrounded by paparazzi flashbulbs and judgment. And now, I insisted, a single, dire outcome was on the cards.
While reading I finally thought of this false claim you thought you knewNew tell-all by Spears’ ex-husband Kevin FederlineThe father of her two children and America’s least favorite white boy, circa 2005. After 200 pages of musings on his former marriage and his aborted rap career, Federline closed his book. with a premonition of destruction Similar to the one I made as a teenager about a decade ago. It’s as empty and useless to Spears as it was to me. “It has become impossible to pretend that everything is OK,” writes Federline. “From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we are approaching the 11th hour. If things don’t change, something bad is going to happen.”
the biggest problem is you thought you knew Does it never explain exactly what needs to change? Federline has portrayed Spears as an unpredictable and frequently unstable person whose mood swings and erratic behavior have traumatized her two sons, now 19 and 20, and derailed both her pop career and personal life. He alleges historical drug use and drinking, and points to serious dysfunction of the broader Spears clan, which means it would have had a huge impact on her life, even if she wouldn’t have become one of the most famous women on the planet. They claim that Spears’ current use of Instagram – where she posts almost daily videos of herself dancing in her home or in restaurant bathrooms or in the hallways of Mexican hotels, all of which are sometimes accompanied by captions of varying legibility – is indicative of both an unstable person and a drug user. But whether or not she is legally prevented from doing so, Federline doesn’t explain, or ask, anything further on the page. Why Spears is just who she is. you thought you knewThen again, this is a deeply conservative book: Federline clearly presents the chaos surrounding Spears as a situation entirely of her own making, while all of her vivid descriptions of that chaos suggest the opposite.
Federline is a tireless storyteller, with a limited vocabulary and a very bleak outlook on the world. If becoming a professional back-up dancer and then marrying Spears isn’t “surreal” (a word repeated eight times throughout the book), it is a “whirlwind” (repeated 11 times). He is undoubtedly a loving, committed and responsible father – but so is my father, and I don’t see him writing a book about himself. In fact, Federline’s life outside of Spears is so eventful that her birth, childhood, and adolescence are summarized in a single chapter in the middle of the book. The bits that aren’t about Spears are almost hilarious in their ordinariness. “Pink had arranged for us to go on a full-day horseback ride,” he writes. “We saw black cockatoos (which I didn’t even know existed), giant monitor lizards, koalas, kangaroos and much more… It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.” Readers with perky ears may find Federline’s insights compelling (“The truth is, fame is a double-edged sword”; “Something changed in Britney’s behavior as soon as the paparazzi arrived… she was more anxious”), but everyone else will be appalled.
I wouldn’t say Spears comes off badly in the book, if only because the behavior Federline alleges is rooted in a toxic cocktail of stardom, paranoia, new money, and mental illness. Spears has never confirmed nor denied that she is living with mental illness, and has denied ever having a drug or alcohol addiction (he wrote in his memoirsof 2023 the woman inside methat she at one time became dependent on the ADHD medication Adderall to deal with depression). However, he has written repeatedly on Instagram about experiencing long-term trauma as a result of his family and the conservatorship under which he was placed for 13 years, which – as of late 2021 – gave his father Jamie full legal power over his finances, his relationships, and his day-to-day workload. She has alleged that she was forcibly kept in a psychiatric facility and given the drug Lithium. This week, amid an Instagram post calling Federline’s book full of “white lies”, she wrote that she felt as if “my wings were taken away and my brain was damaged”.
Discussion about Spears’ mental health remains largely restricted in official Britney fan circles. Popular fan forums and Britney-themed subreddits often ban users who express well-intentioned concern for her current well-being. I’m afraid this is a bit misguided – Spears often seems completely alone in her cavernous mansion, angry and isolated from her family and at least one of her sons, and lacking many real friends or team. It’s OK to worry about and talk about Spears, whose life seems incredibly difficult. But I also understand the impulse to shut down such discourse: The language of voyeuristic celebrity tabloid coverage has evolved in sneaky and quite nasty ways since 2007, with pointing and laughing replaced by bland fake compassion. “Britney Spears causes concern with off-key rendition of Prince song in bizarre video from cluttered mansion,” one article said. daily Mail Title in August.
Federline takes a similar approach, delivering Perez Hilton-era rants in a sympathetic tone. you thought you knew Drowned in gory details of Spears’ apparent dysfunction while vaguely pleading Any To do… Some!? He appears like a street preacher distributing blank pamphlets. The final chapters are beyond the lines. In the span of a few paragraphs, Federline alternately blames the “narcissistic” Spears for her own behavior, sadly declares that she has “nobody who really cares about her,” attacks fans for supporting the movement to get Spears out of her conservatorship, mildly suggests that Spears should be placed under another conservatorship, and then Ultimately fans are asked to “stand by our sons and their mothers – now, more than ever, they need your support”.
This is meaningless, meaningless nonsense. I don’t know what Federline hopes to gain from this. Apart from seizing the opportunity to stand proudly above a potential tragedy, and, like a mouthy teenager in a secondary school drama class, claim that he told you so.
‘You Thought You Knew’ is available now via Listenin’