So far, as Britney Spears tells it, she has only managed to forgive one estranged family member: June Spears Sr., her long dead grandfather, who looms over nearly every page of her memoir, The Woman in Me. Toward the book’s end, Spears writes, “I’ve had dreams in which June tells me he knows he hurt my father, who then hurt me. I felt his love and that he’d changed on the other side [of death]. I hope that one day I will be able to feel better about the rest of my family, too.”
June is not the only ghost haunting The Woman in Me, but he’s certainly the most frightening. A police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, June sired 10 children with three wives. Two of those wives, June committed to a mental hospital in nearby Mandeville against their will.
That’s hardly the extent of his violence. “One of my father’s half sisters has said that June sexually abused her starting when she was eleven, until she ran away at sixteen,” Spears writes, while hinting at more general physical abuse. Her grandfather was also a “sports fanatic,” who “made my father exercise long past the point of exhaustion,” something Spears would later encounter at her own father’s hand. To those who have followed Britney’s recent legal battles, and the twists and turns of her conservatorship, June’s bruising personality will sound all too familiar.
“Thinking back on the way my father was raised by June and the way I was brought up by him, I had known from the jump that it would be an actual nightmare to have him in charge.”
After 13 years under her father Jamie Spears’ legal control, Britney finally won her emancipation in November 2021. She has now been free for almost two years, and she is wielding The Woman in Me to wrest back control of her story — from her father, the tabloids, her exes, her extended family, various scandalized elders, random people on the internet; you name it. According to Spears, just about everyone has put in their two cents on Britney, except Britney.
The Woman in Me has plenty of scores to settle, though that’s not its chief concern. It also has more than a few tedious detours through old talent shows and industry auditions, as Spears fondly recounts what she wore and which songs she performed from the age of three onwards. But beyond the gossip and underneath the sequins is one of the most remarkable celebrity memoirs in recent memory.
