This is a harrowing account of exploitation and a must-read if you're a fan of Britney or if you're interested in reexamining much-maligned women of the aughts. (Or if you spent a lot of time obsessed with her in elementary school and then grew into an NLOG phase where you hated her and refused to recognize that "Toxic" was a good song and mostly stopped caring after awhile but thought "If You Seek Amy" was a bop... So me. If you're me.) I'm glad that she got to tell her story, and I hope that it inspires more widespread compassion for her. Regardless of your opinion of her music or her place in pop culture, I think it would be difficult to come away from this memoir without the conviction that what she was subjected to--by her family, by the media, and by men that she loved and thought she could trust--was unjust.

While some topics felt less detailed than some readers might hope, I really appreciate that she acknowledges how her Southern upbringing influenced her life. I've lived in the South my entire life and am just a handful of years younger than Britney, and I saw similar things growing up: the common knowledge of how certain families' men abuse women and how nothing ever gets done about it, the pressure on girls to shut up and do whatever they have to in order to keep everyone happy, and the ways that unruly women have the tendency to get shunted into psychiatric care not to help them heal, but to get them under control.

I spent a lot of time while reading this book taking breaks to look up photos and videos from the times she discusses. Recontextualizing them with the knowledge of what she was enduring is heartbreaking. But similarly, watching more recent Instagram videos of her dancing and playing dress-up feels so different when you divorce your perception of them from people making memes and poking fun at her, and instead see them as a woman reconnecting with a sense of joy and self-determination that was stolen from her for so long. Let this woman dance around in her underwear! She spent 13 years with her dad monitoring every time she went to the bathroom and not letting her eat chocolate!

Michelle Williams nails her narration of the audiobook, so I recommend it in that format for sure.