Britney Spears is speaking out.
Of course, the pop superstar’s memoir The Woman In Me is set to hit bookshelves all over the country beginning next Tuesday. But this week, in the new issue of People, the 41-year-old singer is opening up by sharing a few excerpts from her book before it’s released to the general public.
Related: Jessica Simpson Responds To Being Mistaken For Britney Spears At The Mall! Oops!
In one particularly jaw-dropping excerpt, the Baby One More Time crooner writes about how she was “infantilized” and became “a robot” after her father Jamie Spears was granted conservatorship control over Britney’s life, personal affairs, and finances back in 2008. Recalling that time in her younger days, Brit wrote:
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Noting how she quickly began to feel like “a shadow of myself” under the conservatorship, the Toxic singer added more in the forthcoming memoir:
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
And she concluded this excerpt with a flourish, referencing the title of her autobiography while making a case for why she should have been let to live freely:
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”
Powerfully written!!
Related: OMG! Michelle Williams Is The Big Star Who Recorded Britney Spears’ Memoir!
BTW, in an accompanying cover story interview with People that’s also out this week, Spears said this about her decision to bare all via the memoir now that her conservatorship has finally been terminated:
“Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me. After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life. It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out. And my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.”
There will no doubt be a LOT to take in as more excerpts from the book comes out — and of course when the memoir is released in full next Tuesday.
Thoughts, Perezcious readers??
[Image via Britney Spears/Instagram/WENN]