The Audience and Responsibility of Memoirs

The celebrity memoir has long been a place for public figures to set the record straight on the story of their lives. By any measure, Britney Spears’s life, as detailed in her new book, “The Woman in Me,” is rich material. The pop star rose to fame in the early two-thousands, and, after enduring a series of mental-health crises, was placed in a conservatorship through which her father controlled almost every aspect of her day-to-day existence. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the “horror story” that emerges in the memoir as the teen-aged Spears is betrayed by everyone around her: a family intent on profiting off her talent; a young Justin Timberlake, who used his romance with Spears as a stepping stone for his own career; a ravenous media that both sexualized and shamed her. The hosts consider how “The Woman in Me” fits within the broader canon of celebrity memoirs, citing the producer Julia Phillips’s “burn-it-all-down” best-seller, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” and the late Matthew Perry’s 2022 meditation on his struggles with addiction, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Ultimately, these stories are just one facet of a broader narrative—and a kind of performance in their own right. “Once you submit to being a celebrity, your music, and how you appear in magazines, and what you produce as a memoir all contribute to this one big text,” Cunningham says. “It’s this grand synthesis, and, in the end, the text is Britney herself.”

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