The Biggest Bombshells from Britney Spears' Memoir “The Woman in Me”

Britney Spears recounts her life, from the exhilarating highs to most challenging lows, in her memoir 'The Woman in Me'

Britney Spears delves into her past in her newly-released book, The Woman in Me.

The singer's first-ever memoir, which published on Oct. 24, chronicles everything from her rise to superstardom to what she calls her "soul-crushing" conservatorship experience and her past relationships.

It details the many highs throughout Spears' life, including the joy she found as a Mouseketeer alongside Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling, early dates with Justin Timberlake and as a mother to sons Sean Preston and Jayden James.

Spears also details some of her darkest days from her past, including how she's long felt under extreme scrutiny. She breaks her silence on how she's been affected by the nearly 14-year conservatorship she was put under after mental health challenges in 2008, which granted her father Jamie and a lawyer control over Spears’ financial and personal affairs.

Related: Britney Spears Opens Up: 'Finally Free' to Share Her Story in Bombshell Memoir & New Interview — 'No More Lies' (Exclusive)

"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," Spears writes in the memoir. "The woman in me was pushed down for a long time."

Michelle Williams narrates the audio edition of The Woman in Me, while the pop icon recorded an introduction to the audiobook. "This book has been a labor of love and all the emotions that come with it,” Spears said in a statement shared with PEOPLE.

“Reliving everything has been exciting, heart-wrenching, and emotional, to say the least," she added. "For those reasons, I will only be reading a small part of my audiobook.”

Here's a look at the biggest revelations from Spears' The Woman in Me.

Britney Spears says she became a 'child-robot' under conservatorship

In her new memoir, Spears discusses life under the court-ordered conservatorship, which in 2008 granted her father Jamie and a lawyer control over Spears’ financial and personal affairs. During that time, the singer says she became "a sort of child-robot."

"I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Spears writes in the book. The "conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood" and "made me into a child," she adds.

"I became more of an entity than a person onstage," writes Spears, who says she felt "like a shadow of myself" under the conservatorship. "I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”

Related: Britney Spears Describes What It Was Like Living Under Conservatorship: I Became a 'Child-Robot' (Exclusive)

Britney Spears accuses her dad of using her image for his 'cash flow'

Spears also accuses Jamie of using her image for his "cash flow" over the course of her conservatorship, including a time in which says says he told her, "I'm Britney Spears now."

She writes that she was considered "too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week.”

When reflecting on her relationship with her father during that time, the singer says that Jamie body-shamed her and "repeatedly" told her that she "looked fat." She writes, "If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father."

She goes on to blame Jamie and the oppressive conservatorship for losing the spark for singing and dancing.

"Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child,” she writes. “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.”

Related: Britney Spears Says Dad Body-Shamed Her During Conservatorship: 'He Repeatedly Told Me I Looked Fat' (Exclusive)

Britney Spears says 2003 Diane Sawyer interview 'exploited' her

Looking back at her now-controversial November 2003 interview with Diane Sawyer, where Spears was pressed about many aspects of her personal life and career, the singer says she felt "exploited" and that the interview was a "breaking point."

"I felt like I had been exploited, set up in front of the whole world," the singer writes of her Primetime sit-down interview.

Sawyer grilled Spears on her high-profile split from Timberlake with a line of questioning inspired by rumors (sparked by Timberlake himself) that the pop star had cheated on him; she also asked Spears questions about her body, her "provocative" image and whether she was fit to be a role model to little girls.

Britney Spears shares a look into the beginning (and the end) of her relationship with Justin Timberlake

In a different passage, Spears talks about the music video for Timberlake's 2002 song "Cry Me a River," which features a plot described by Spears as "a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain."

She says that while the media backlash and response to the video painted her as a "harlot who'd broken the heart of America's golden boy," in reality, she was "comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood."

In the book, Spears also reveals that she and Timberlake kissed during a game of Truth or Dare at a Mouseketeer sleepover. The singer also confirms that she once kissed choreographer Wade Robson while dating Timberlake.

Related: Britney Spears Says 'Cry Me a River' Video Painted Her as a 'Harlot' When in Reality She Was 'Comatose' over Breakup

Britney Spears reveals she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake

In another revelation about her relationship, Spears shares that she became pregnant with Timberlake's baby but had an abortion — an experience she kept private for 20 years.

“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” Spears writes of the pregnancy. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young."

Spears reveals that that she "never would have done it" if the decision "had been left up to me alone," but she says Justin was "so sure that he didn't want to be a father." She calls her experience of undergoing the abortion "one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life."

Related: Britney Spears Recalls Kissing Justin Timberlake Playing Truth or Dare at Mouseketeer Sleepover (Exclusive)

Britney Spears says 'I knew' Justin Timberlake 'cheated on me'

The pop star was 17 when she began dating the then-18-year-old *NSYNC singer in 1999, and they were together until 2002. In her memoir, Spears says she was aware that Timberlake was cheating on her, but chose not to say anything, as the relationship was new and she was head over heels for the star.

“There were a couple of times during our relationship when I knew Justin had cheated on me. Especially because I was so infatuated and so in love, I let it go, even though the tabloids seemed determined to rub my face in it,” Spears writes. “When NSYNC went to London in 2000, photographers caught him with one of the girls from All Saints in a car. But I never said anything. At the time we’d only been together for a year.”

Spears recalls another time when she and Timberlake were in Las Vegas and he strayed once again. She details the situation, but doesn't reveal the name of the woman because Spears writes she's "actually very popular" and "she’s married with kids now," adding, "I don’t want her to feel bad.”

Britney Spears recalls what led to her shaved head and umbrella attack in 2007

Spears opened up about her decision to shave her head in 2007, explaining that it had to do with being "eyeballed so much" as she grew up. "I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager," the singer writes in her memoir.

She says, "Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back."

In addition to explaining her haircut, Spears looks back on hitting a photographer's car with an umbrella after she shaved her head that year. She explains that grief and her custody battle were weighing heavily on her at the time.

"With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom," writes Spears. "Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself."

Britney Spears says men were 'looking me up and down' during auditions at age 15

Spears looks back at the early days of her career, including when she signed her first record deal at age 15. As Spears writes, Larry Rudolph — a lawyer, who would become her early manager — brought her around to labels for auditions.

“Larry took me around [New York City], and I went into rooms full of executives and sang Whitney Houston’s ‘I Have Nothing,’” she writes. “Gazing out at the rooms full of men in suits looking me up and down in my small dress and high heels, I sang loud.”

Spears also reflects on the ways in which her rise to fame was handled differently in the media than that of her male counterparts. “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery,” she writes.

The "Toxic" singer says she “couldn’t help but notice” that, while she was dating Timberlake in the early 2000s, he wasn't faced with the more invasive questions she was often confronted with in interviews.

Related: Britney Spears Slams TV Hosts for 'Making Strange Comments About My Breasts' at Start of Career

Britney Spears says she thought the snake 'would kill' her during iconic VMAs performance

In her memoir, Spears recalls her iconic MTV Video Music Awards performance from 2001. Specifically, she details the thoughts going through her head when she performed with an albino Burmese python named Banana wrapped around her shoulders.

While the star's "plan" was to sing "I’m a Slave 4 U" and use the "snake as a prop" in her performance, Spears writes that it was "even more terrifying than it appeared." Particularly, she describes the moment when the reptile got too close for comfort.

"The snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing,” Spears writes, noting that it started "flicking" its tongue and "hissing" at her. During the performance, the singer tried to keep her head down because she felt like "it would kill" her if she "caught its eye."

Britney Spears says partying with Paris Hilton wasn't as 'wild' as portrayed

The “Hold Me Closer” singer became friendly with the heiress around the time Spears' marriage to Kevin Federline began to crumble, in 2006. Spears explains in her memoir that her outings with Paris Hilton weren’t as “wild” as the press made them seem.

Spears writes in the book that she “never had a drinking problem" and that hard drugs weren't appealing to her. Her “drug of choice,” she reveals, was the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”

Meanwhile, Hilton told PEOPLE in October that she’s “so proud” of Spears “for telling her story” in her book. Comparing her own experience in publishing a memoir, Hilton hopes that Spears can have the same “healing experience” that she had in the writing process.

Related: Britney Spears Reveals She Drank 'Daiquiris' with Her Mom in 8th Grade: We Called Them 'Toddies' (Exclusive)

Britney Spears recalls 'passionate' two-week romance with Colin Farrell

Spears was still reeling from her 2002 breakup with Timberlake when she had her whirlwind romance with Colin Farrell. At the time, she says, she didn't want to get to “too attached” to the Irish actor, who she met when he was filming the 2003 action flick S.W.A.T. 

Meanwhile, the "Piece of Me" singer says that she and Farrell had "a two-week brawl," she writes in her book of her high-profile fling. "Brawl is the only word for it — we were all over each other, grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight.”

Farrell, then 26, brought the pop star along as his date to the January 2003 premiere of his movie The Recruit.

Britney Spears' 55-hour Las Vegas marriage was 'innocent fun'

In January 2004, Spears and her friend Jason Alexander were goofing around in Las Vegas, watching movies and staying up late, when the two ("s---faced," as she recalls) decided in the very early morning to head to The Little White Chapel.

"People have asked me if I loved him. To be clear: he and I were not in love," she writes in her memoir. "I was just honestly very drunk — and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored."

Spears felt the wedding was "innocent fun," and was shocked at the way her family reacted ("as if I started World War III.")

Britney Spears says 'method acting' messed with her mind while filming Crossroads

Spears opened up about her real experience while filming Crossroads, revealing that "method acting" caused the 2002 road trip dramedy to be unexpectedly disorienting.

"The experience wasn’t easy for me. My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind," Spears writes of her experience. She says that she "didn't have any separation at all" because she "didn't know how to break out of my character."

Once filming was over, Spears ultimately decided acting wasn’t for her. "That was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved," she admits. "I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again."

Related: Photos of Britney Spears with Sons Sean Preston and Jayden James

Britney Spears says she gave up "freedom" to have access to her kids

Spears writes that after being hospitalized twice for involuntary psychological assessments, she initially tried to push back on her father's control over her. Her decision to stop challenging the court-ordered conservatorship, however, was so that she could spend time with her children.

“After being held down on a gurney, I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to,” Spears writes. "And so I went along with it."

“My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make,” she adds.

Her children now live in Hawaii with Federline and his wife Victoria, but they are in touch. As Spears told PEOPLE, “Starting a family was my dream come true. Being a mom was my dream come true.”

Britney Spears says she's working to 'feel more compassion' toward Jamie Lynn

Spears reflects on her tumultuous relationship with sister Jamie Lynn Spears, with whom she’s both publicly feuded and seemingly made amends with in recent years.

“She will always be my sister, and I love her and her beautiful family. I’m working to feel more compassion than anger toward her, and everyone who I feel has wronged me. It’s not that easy,” Spears writes.

The pop star also writes about being protective over Jamie Lynn while growing up, recalling an incident in which she had “words” with one of Jamie Lynn’s costars on the set of Zoey 101 after her sister “complained" about the actress. Spears also reflects on learning about Jamie Lynn's teenage pregnancy.

Britney Spears reveals when she first learned about the #FreeBritney movement

Spears first became aware of the #FreeBritney movement while in rehab. She writes in her memoir that in 2018 she had been pushing back against her court-ordered conservatorship, but had to endure further mental health evaluations and a stint in rehab.

“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, claiming that he’d make her look like an “idiot” if she didn't comply. Spears writes on, detailing her experience of being "locked up against my will."

While in the facility, a nurse showed the musician videos of fans who had organized to support her and were questioning the need for her conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”

Britney Spears explains famous Madonna kiss

"I started running into Madonna all over the world," Spears writes. "We’d greet each other as friends." The "Toxic" singer went on to detail her relationship with the "Material Girl" singer through the years and how she's had a "good effect" on her life.

The pop divas memorably hit the stage — and locked lips — at the 2003 MTV VMAs, to which Spears explained how that iconic moment came to be. "Every time we rehearsed it, we did an air kiss," she writes of the iconic performance.

"About two minutes before the performance, I was sitting on the side of the stage thinking about my biggest performance to date at the VMAs, when I’d pulled off a suit to reveal a sparkly outfit. I thought to myself: I want a moment like that again this year. With the kiss, should I just go for it? ... A lot was made of that kiss."

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