The pop princess seen as a gothic heroine. It is the unthinkable narrative strategy, due to its audacity, that Britney Spears’ long-awaited autobiography relies on, The woman that I am (Plaza & Janés), which became one of the publishing phenomena of 2023 after its simultaneous publication in 26 markets – and the collection of 15 million dollars by its author. Unlike other books at the service of the stars, here The revelations worthy of a tabloid are not as important as the rigorous account of his descent into hell, narrated with a literary voice that has little to do with the neutral or official record of similar products.
The book often subtly approaches a gothic novel in its southern variant, set in the semi-rural Louisiana where she was born and, later, in the quagmire of the entertainment industry, where Spears will land as in the land of Oz, although in the hallucinated version of a Lynchian nightmare. Whoever wrote those lines—according to the American press, his black literary was the journalist Sam Lansky—he handles this exemplarily leitmotiv. In the first pages she takes us to the forests of her childhood, where Britney took refuge away from the screams of an alcoholic father and a moron mother. “Lying in silence on those stones, I felt God,” she says in an amazing prologue. There’s more: the Spears house was “a madhouse” in which the protagonist often felt like “a ghost.” During her disaster in the 2000s, one day she felt “how something dark penetrated her body” and transformed her, as if she were “a werewolf,” into a bad person. Towards the end, when remembering the mobilization of her followers to the cry of #FreeBritney in 2021, she already borders on the esoteric or paranormal: “In the same way that I think I perceive how someone in Nebraska feels, my connection with the fans subconsciously helped them to knowing that I was in danger.”
The book is centered on this captivating character of a woman subjected to manipulation and ridicule, another classic of this subgenre, who at times doubts her sanity, as will happen to the reader. Is this delusional damsel in distress Or is she lucid when describing the mistreatment of a system governed by fierce misogyny, which saw her as an easy target due to her apparent fragility, her vulnerable age, her everlasting smile? Another Gothic subtext runs through these pages. “Tragedy has marked my family,” warns the narrator. His grandmother Jean committed suicide by shooting herself at the grave of her dead son at the age of three, after falling into depression and being treated with lithium, as would later happen to the granddaughter she never met, as if she were the victim of a prophecy. Her given name is Britney Jean.
Her other grandmother had emigrated from the United Kingdom to the town of 2,000 inhabitants where the singer grew up cleaning crabs in the family business. These transatlantic origins gave her the awareness of coming from a more sophisticated place—a London that she evokes with a high degree of unreality, full of “tea afternoons and museums”—and perhaps moral permission not to end up becoming another rustic in Dinerolandia. It wouldn’t be like that: at 13 she smoked and drank daiquiris supplied by her mother and at 14 she lost her virginity to her brother’s best friend (she continued sleeping with the latter “until sixth grade”, in case there is a psychoanalyst in the room). ).
At the heart of the book, in every sense of the word, is the story of his downfall. It begins with her separation from Justin Timberlake, martyr of an alleged adultery that will make Britney the bitch eldest of the kingdom, in “a whore who had broken the heart of America’s favorite boy” (in reality, the infidelity was mutual, but its effects would be asymmetrical). Since then, she lived as if she suffered from “some kind of curse.” It was followed by a two-day Las Vegas wedding, another union that ended with him losing custody of her two children, a calamitous performance at the MTV Awards, and an on-air meltdown when she shaved her head in front of the crowd. cameras. And, shortly after, a legal guardianship imposed by her family to prevent the goose that laid the golden eggs, thanks to which everyone subsisted, from going to waste completely. Britney spent 13 years under the yoke of her father, who controlled her schedule, her diet, and even her contraception.
The character fits into different American imaginaries. Britney is an adult child who will eventually become an adult child, which justifies the recurring comparison of her to Benjamin Button in the book. “In a way, they transformed me back into a teenager,” she writes. She refers to her family, but she can go further. In a country obsessed with whether her hymen was still intact, she was tolerated as long as she pretended to be a virgin, but immediately expelled from pop heaven when it became clear that she used her genitals for more than just reproduction. There appears Hester, the adulterous protagonist of The scarlet letterNathaniel Hawthorne’s American Eve, scourge of settler Puritanism who also fictionalized the Salem Trials in The house of the seven gables. It is no coincidence that Britney compares herself to those condemned: “They threw the woman into a pond and, if she floated, she was a witch and they killed her, but if she sank, she was innocent and, well, she died anyway.” She drowned several times.
We see Lolita wander through the book, the sexualized girl who ends up becoming waste white trash. To those vulgar women, from a social stratum intermediate between blacks and whites, that Flannery O’Connor describes in his stories. To the heroines who believe they are going mad, victims of gaslighting, such as Jane Eyre, Rebecca in Maurier’s Daphne or the protagonist of The yellow wallpaper. Although the evil here is not caused by perverse or crazy stepmothers locked in the attic: the villain of this story is, without a doubt, her father. The passage in which he announces that, from that moment on, “he will be Britney Spears” is especially terrifying, thus concluding the usurpation of his personality, another stainless trope of this subgenre.
Despite being aware that her confessional self is a literary construction—just compare the book with her ramshackle texts on Instagram to understand that she did not write it alone—we read these chapters with the conviction that we are listening to her voice. In that sense, as with Michelle Williams in the audiobook version, Lansky’s work is admirable. A connection is discernible between the artist and his model: only six years younger, the writer often writes about stars in the American press and knows what addictions and falls from grace are, having been saved in extremis of an overdose when he was a promising college student.
Despite the limits of the sacrificial and edifying narrative that the exercise imposes by contract, the co-author of the book manages to leave a personal mark on this assignment and, at the same time, remains faithful to a character who is still an eloquent version of itself, like a songwriter to compose a custom song for him. They are anthology, simply brilliant, his winks to Timberlake’s wounded masculinity, in his effortful imitation of African-American codes (“!Oh yeahWhat a mess! Ginuwine! What’s new, brother?”), or the tragicomic ordeal it was for Britney to beg for chips during her guardianship and never be given them: so that she wouldn’t gain weight, she was only allowed to eat chicken and canned vegetables (“It was degrading “).
The most disturbing moment of this journey due to its rise, fall and rehabilitation, of very considerable psychological depth, comes in the final section, with the protagonist turned into a broken doll who practices ineffable choreographies with knives on her Instagram account. A pathetic vignette, in the pictorial sense of the word, with which she seems to beg for a second chance. “I came into this world naked,” she remembers to justify displaying herself like this on her social networks today: it is not to eroticize herself once again, as she did as a teenager, but to return to that primordial moment when everything was still possible. . And so she continues sailing, like a ship against the current, returned incessantly to the disastrous present of her.
Britney Spears
Translation by Marta de Bru de Sala, Verónica Canales and Noemí Risco.
Plaza & Janés, 2023. 280 pages. 21.90 euros
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