Britney Spears to publish tell-all memoir after release from conservatorship
The publisher Simon & Schuster has acquired the rights to the singer’s biography, for which it reportedly paid around $15 million
Singer Britney Spears is to publish a tell-all memoir about “her rise to fame, her music career and her relationship with her family,” according to multiple US media sources. Spears was freed last November from a legal conservatorship that allowed her father, Jamie Spears, complete legal control over her finances and day-to-day existence from its signing in 2008.
During the court case, Spears had opened up in court about being forced to remain on contraception and having her social life restricted while simultaneously making her family millions of dollars from concert revenues. After she was released from the conservatorship, there was great expectation about when she would share more of her story.
The singer of Toxic had left the door open for a possible interview with Oprah Winfrey, but has instead decided to take the longer but more prestigious path of writing a memoir. The memoir announcement was first published by Variety magazine and the New York Post’s Page Six entertainment news site.
Variety and Page Six reported the deal would “break records” in publishing with the possible exceptions of the books written by Barack and Michelle Obama as part of a $65 million (€58 million) deal. Spears’ memoir was hotly contested with several rival bids raised before Simon & Schuster emerged victorious. According to Page Six, the publisher reportedly paid $15 million (€13.2 million) to acquire the book rights.
The singer has yet to comment on the future project, which comes on the heels of the publication of her younger sister Jamie Lynn’s own memoir Things I Should Have Said. Spears’ sister recounts negative anecdotes about Britney from their childhood, leading the singer to brand her “scum” in a now-deleted Instagram post. The now 30-year-old actress claimed that her older sister became “a second mother” to her but that over the years she saw the pop star’s behavior become “erratic” and “paranoid.”
In the book, Jamie Lynn also describes an episode when Britney came into her room with a knife in her hand and locked them both inside. The singer denies this happened. “I wish you would take a lie detector test so all these masses of people see you’re lying through your teeth about me!!!!” Britney wrote. Her sister replied indirectly by posting: “Nobody trashes your name more than someone who’s afraid you’ll tell people the truth.”
The publication date of Spears’ book is as yet unknown, so we will have to wait and see how Jamie Lynn is portrayed, as well as her older, relatively unknown brother Bryan. Then there are her parents. Britney has already said that her father Jamie “should be in prison” for the treatment he subjected her to during the conservatorship years, while Lynne, Britney’s mother, had also demanded that he release her from her captive legal state, in which she was held for 13 years.