Britney Spears Talks Shaving Her Head, Living Like a ‘Child-Robot’ & More in New Memoir

Britney Spears’ new memoir “The Woman in Me” is almost here!

People magazine has excerpts from the tell-all book that reveal why she shaved her head in 2007, what it was like living under a conservatorship for 13 years, and some of her father Jamie’s past hurtful comments.

Britney was in the middle of a divorce from Kevin Federline in 2007 when she famously shaved her head.

“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up,” she writes. “I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager… Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”

By the following year, Britney was under a court-ordered conservatorship controlled by her father and a lawyer.

Spears recalls, “Under the conservatorship, I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”

She says the conservatorship killed her creativity. “I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”

The pop star adds, “If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out. Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick… Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

Britney says of the conservatorship, which ended in 2021, “I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot,” Spears said. “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself. The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

The artist goes on, “This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”

Looking back, she shares, “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”

She says her father Jamie also made hurtful comments while she was under the conservatorship, writing, “If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”

“Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”