‘Lastly Free’ to Share Her Story in Bombshell Memoir & New Interview — ‘No Extra Lies’ (Unique)

The pop icon will launch her bombshell memoir, ‘The Lady in Me,’ on Oct. 24, and PEOPLE has an unique excerpt

It’s a sun-kissed afternoon in late September, and Britney Spears pirouettes in powdery white sands on a seaside in Tahiti. Tousled blond hair falls over her shoulders as she goes barefoot on the surf’s edge. The 41-year-old pop icon, capturing images for the duvet of PEOPLE whereas on a tropical getaway, smooths her Anthropologie sundress, fixes her bangs and strikes into the shallows looking for a very good shot. Working the digital camera as solely she will, Spears appears up and smiles.

But, till Nov. 12, 2021 — the day a Los Angeles County choose terminated the conservatorship that had ruled Spears’ life for almost 14 years — she had few respites like this. The authorized victory, following fervent testimony wherein Spears accused her father Jamie, 71, and others of exploitation and abuse, set the stage for a second act that’s each exhilarating and difficult. “Studying this new freedom, I’ll admit, is difficult at occasions,” she tells PEOPLE in an unique interview, performed by way of electronic mail.

There have been setbacks as she’s navigated her new regular, together with her split from model-actor Sam Asghari, 29, in August after simply 14 months of marriage. She additionally has an advanced relationship along with her household, together with her dad, mother Lynne, 68, and sister Jamie Lynn, 32. However there have additionally been excessive notes: Her collaboration with Elton John, “Maintain Me Nearer,” for one, marked her first Prime 10 hit on the Billboard Scorching 100 in 11 years. Principally, although, Spears says she finds pleasure in on a regular basis moments, whether or not “I’m enjoying with my canines … [or] watching episodes of Friends and stomach laughing. I like, like to journey and discover,” she says. “I’m a easy lady.”

When Spears appears again on one of the best occasions of her life, she recollects her earliest days of performing, “journeys with my dancers [and] performing foolish with my girlfriends.” However she’s proudest of changing into a mom to sons Sean Preston, now 18, and Jayden James, 17, along with her ex-husband Kevin Federline. “Beginning a household was my dream come true,” she tells PEOPLE of elevating her boys, who now stay with their dad in Hawaii, however are involved with Spears. “Being a mother was my dream come true.”

One other dream has been to reclaim her voice. “Over the previous 15 years and even at first of my profession, I sat again whereas folks spoke about me and informed my story for me,” she says. “After getting out of my conservatorship, I used to be lastly free to inform my story with out penalties from the folks in command of my life.”

Associated: Michelle Williams to Narrate Britney Spears Memoir The Woman in Me: ‘I Stand with Britney’ (Exclusive)

The result’s a revealing new memoir, The Woman in Me, excerpted under. Sharing often-brutal truths, Spears particulars her unimaginable journey from teen celebrity to one of many bestselling feminine artists of all time, her “soul-crushing” conservatorship expertise and her previous relationships. “It is arduous to talk about,” Spears says of recounting her life’s darker moments, together with “not getting a second of peace, the judgments from strangers who do not even know me, having my freedom stripped away from me by my household and the federal government [and] shedding my ardour for the issues I like.”

Now it’s Spears’ time to wrestle again the narrative.

“It’s lastly time for me to boost my voice and converse out, and my followers deserve to listen to it instantly from me,” she says. “No extra conspiracy, no extra lies — simply me proudly owning my previous, current and future.”

In flip, Spears would like to empower others to do the identical, telling PEOPLE she hopes the general takeaway is to “converse up. Be loud. Know your value. Encourage folks and most of all, simply be form.”

Associated: Britney Spears Sets Fall Date for ‘Brave’ Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’ — See the Book Cover Reveal (Exclusive)

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A precocious child from Kentwood, La., Spears was solid on The Mickey Mouse Membership at age 11.

Being within the present was boot camp for the leisure trade: intensive dance rehearsals, singing classes, performing courses, time within the recording studio, and college in between. The Mouseketeers shortly break up into our personal cliques, divided by the dressing rooms that we shared: Christina Aguilera and I had been the youthful children, and we shared a dressing room. We appeared as much as the older children — Keri Russell, Ryan Gosling, and Tony Lucca, who I believed was so good-looking. And I shortly linked with a boy named Justin Timberlake.

It was truthfully a child’s dream — unbelievably enjoyable, notably for a child like me. Nevertheless it was additionally exceptionally arduous work: we’d run choreography thirty occasions in a day, making an attempt to get each step good.

[Once] at a sleepover, we performed Reality or Dare, and somebody dared Justin to kiss me. A Janet Jackson music was enjoying within the background as he leaned in and kissed me.

When the present ended a yr and a half later … I made a decision to return to Kentwood. Already inside me was a push-pull: a part of me needed to maintain constructing towards the dream; the opposite half needed me to stay a traditional life in Louisiana. For a minute, I needed to let normalcy win.

Again at dwelling, I returned to [high school], settling into regular teenage life — or the closest factor to “regular” that was potential in my household.

For enjoyable, beginning once I was in eighth grade, my mother and I might make the two-hour drive from Kentwood to Biloxi, Mississippi, and whereas we had been there, we’d drink daiquiris. We known as our cocktails “toddies.” I liked that I used to be capable of drink with my mother now and again. The best way we drank was nothing like how my father did it. When he drank, he grew extra depressed and shut down. We grew to become happier, extra alive and adventurous.

There was one thing so fantastically regular about that interval of my life: going to homecoming and promenade, driving round our little city, going to the flicks.

However, the reality was, I missed performing. My mother had been in contact with a lawyer she’d met on my audition circuit, a person named Larry Rudolph, who she would name generally for enterprise recommendation. He recommended I file a demo. He had a music that Toni Braxton had recorded for her second album that had ended up on the slicing room flooring. This is able to change into the demo that I might use to get within the door at file labels.

Larry took me round [New York City], and I went into rooms stuffed with executives and sang Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.” Gazing out on the rooms stuffed with males in fits wanting me up and down in my small gown and excessive heels, I sang loud.

I ended up getting a file take care of Jive Information on the age of fifteen.

The label needed me in a studio instantly.

I labored for hours straight. My work ethic was robust. In case you knew me then, you wouldn’t hear from me for days. I might keep within the studio so long as I might. If anybody needed to go away, I’d say, “I wasn’t good.”

When all of the songs had been performed, somebody mentioned, “What else are you able to do? Do you need to dance now?”

I mentioned, “Hell yeah, I do!”

Following the success of her first two record-smashing albums …Child One Extra Time (1999) and Oops!…I Did It Once more (2000), Spears hit the stage on the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards to advertise her third album, Britney.

The plan was for me to sing “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and we determined I might use a snake as a prop. It’s change into an iconic second in VMAs historical past, however it was much more terrifying than it appeared.

All I knew was to look down, as a result of I felt if I appeared up and caught its eye, it could kill me.

In my head I used to be saying, Simply carry out, simply use your legs and carry out. However what no person is aware of is that as I used to be singing, the snake introduced its head proper round to my face, proper as much as me, and began hissing.

I used to be pondering, Are you f—ing critical proper now? The f—ing goddamn snake’s tongue is flicking out at me. Proper. Now. Lastly, I bought to the half the place I handed it again, thank God.

Whereas recording her album Britney in 2001, Spears additionally filmed her first film, 2002’s Crossroads, a coming-of-age story about teenagers on a street journey, with Zoe Saldaña and Taryn Manning.

The expertise wasn’t simple for me. My downside wasn’t with anybody concerned within the manufacturing however with what performing did to my thoughts. I feel I began Technique performing—solely I didn’t know escape of my character. I actually grew to become this different individual. Some folks do Technique performing, however they’re often conscious of the truth that they’re doing it. However I didn’t have any separation in any respect.

I ended up strolling otherwise, carrying myself otherwise, speaking otherwise. I used to be another person for months whereas I filmed Crossroads. Nonetheless to at the present time, I guess the ladies I shot that film with suppose, She’s somewhat…quirky. In the event that they thought that, they had been proper.

That was just about the start and finish of my performing profession, and I used to be relieved. The Pocket book casting got here all the way down to me and Rachel McAdams, and though it could have been enjoyable to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the Mickey Mouse Membership, I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, as a substitute of engaged on my album Within the Zone I’d have been performing like a Nineteen Forties heiress day and evening.

I think about there are folks within the performing area who’ve handled one thing like that, the place they’d bother separating themselves from a personality.

I hope I by no means get near that occupational hazard once more. Dwelling that means, being half your self and half a fictional character, is tousled. After a when you don’t know what’s actual anymore.

By 2008, Spears — who had welcomed two sons along with her second husband, Kevin Federline — had change into a relentless paparazzi goal and a tabloid fixture. After being positioned below psychiatric holds that February, she was put in a court-ordered conservatorship, granting her father and a lawyer management over Spears’ monetary and private affairs for the following 13 years. In that point, she recorded and launched 4 profitable albums and headlined her Piece of Me Las Vegas residency that grossed $138 million throughout its four-year run. However behind the scenes, she says she was sad.

I’d been eyeballed a lot rising up. I’d been appeared up and down, had folks telling me what they considered my physique, since I used to be a young person. Shaving my head and performing out had been my methods of pushing again. However below the conservatorship I used to be made to know that these days had been now over. I needed to develop my hair out and get again into form. I needed to go to mattress early and take no matter medicine they informed me to take.

If I believed getting criticized about my physique within the press was dangerous, it harm much more from my very own father. He repeatedly informed me I appeared fats and that I used to be going to need to do one thing about it.

I might do little bits of inventive stuff right here and there, however my coronary heart wasn’t in it anymore. So far as my ardour for singing and dancing, it was virtually a joke at that time.

Feeling such as you’re by no means ok is a soul-crushing state of being for a kid. He’d drummed that message into me as a lady, and even after I’d achieved a lot, he was persevering with to try this to me.

I grew to become a robotic. However not only a robotic — a form of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I used to be shedding items of what made me really feel like myself.

The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a baby. I grew to become extra of an entity than an individual onstage. I had at all times felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.

In the event that they’d let me stay my life, I do know I might’ve adopted my coronary heart and are available out of this the correct means and labored it out.

13 years glided by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I feel again now on my father and his associates having management over my physique and my cash for that lengthy and it makes me really feel sick.

Consider what number of male artists gambled all their cash away; what number of had substance abuse or psychological well being points. Nobody tried to remove their management over their our bodies and cash. I didn’t deserve what my household did to me.

The factor was: I achieved rather a lot throughout that point once I was supposedly incapable of caring for myself.

I generally thought that it was virtually humorous how I received these awards for the album I made whereas I used to be supposedly so incapacitated that I needed to be managed by my household.

The reality was, although, once I stopped to consider it for very lengthy, it wasn’t humorous in any respect.

That is what’s arduous to clarify, how shortly I might vacillate between being somewhat lady and being a young person and being a girl, due to the way in which they’d robbed me of my freedom. There was no method to behave like an grownup, since they wouldn’t deal with me like an grownup, so I might regress and act like somewhat lady; however then my grownup self would step again in — solely my world didn’t enable me to be an grownup.

The lady in me was pushed down for a very long time. They needed me to be wild onstage, the way in which they informed me to be, and to be a robotic the remainder of the time. I felt like I used to be being disadvantaged of these good secrets and techniques of life — these basic supposed sins of indulgence and journey that make us human. They needed to remove that specialness and maintain the whole lot as rote as potential. It was dying to my creativity as an artist.

On June 23, 2021, Spears testified in open court, pleading with the choose to finish the conservatorship. Her father was suspended as her conservator in September, and two months later, Spears’ conservatorship was terminated.

It took a very long time and a number of work for me to really feel prepared to inform my story. I hope it evokes folks on some degree and may contact hearts. Since I’ve been free, I’ve needed to assemble a complete totally different id. I’ve needed to say, Wait a second, that is who I used to be — somebody passive and pleasing. A lady. And that is who I’m now — somebody robust and assured. A girl. 

From The Lady in Me by Britney Spears. Copyright © 2023 by Britney Jean Spears. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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The Lady in Me is available for pre-order forward of its launch on Oct. 24.

For extra of the unique excerpt and interview with Britney Spears, decide up the newest concern of PEOPLE, on newsstands all over the place Friday.

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