I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. Today we're going to be talking about a music memoir that is an absolute blockbuster.

It's The Woman in Me by Brittany Spears. And I have with me Rob Sheffield and Brittany Spanos to talk about it.

It's quite a powerful book.

It's a very specific book.

I think we all agree that the heart of this book is Brittany telling her truth about the

conservatorship. There's a few other things that she definitely wanted to get out such as her side of a relationship

with Justin, but it feels like you were saying that it almost was all constructed just to get to

that part.

The entire purpose of the book and why she's releasing it is because of what she

endured for 13 years at the hands of her dad and at the hands of the people who put her in an involuntary conservatorship and it's clear that she would, I don't know that in an alternate timeline of Brittany in her career that she would have written a

memoir maybe ever it seemed like what she wanted more than anything was privacy and

that was something that evaded her for much of her life I always think of an

interview that I think Rob you did it with

Brittany where she talked about how she wanted to like go off to a castle and just

be there for an indefinite amount of time and everything. That's what she

wanted out of her career and so I don't think she would have written this if there wasn't

the idea that she needed to express what happened to her and what sort of led from the

familial side of things to this point of her being told that she cannot be in control of her own life, of

her own business, of her career.

There is a clear sort of narrative arc of this lack of freedom that was leading to a actual kind of being caged in and imprisonment of sorts.

And I think if you come to the book as I originally did looking for a more comprehensive memoir in some ways it does skip things that as a

fan you might want to hear about it helps to understand the purpose you were just

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