Britney Spears to spill beans on how father controlled her life in a memoir coming this October

The singer’s father was named her conservator in 2008 and went on to exercise control over her personal life and finances for more than a decade.

Britney Spears’ highly anticipated memoir, which is expected to chronicle the years she spent in a restrictive conservatorship that ultimately came to a dramatic end in a Los Angeles courtroom, will be released Oct. 24 by Gallery Books, the publisher announced Tuesday.

Titled The Woman in Me, the book will discuss the termination of the conservatorship in 2021 and the impact it had in changing “the course of her life and the lives of countless others,” according to the publisher, which is an imprint of Simon and Schuster.

On Twitter, Spears posted a link to a website for the book with a graphic reading, “My story. On my terms. At last.”

The singer’s father, James Spears, was named her conservator in 2008 amid concerns about her mental health and went on to exercise control over her personal life and finances for more than a decade, even as she continued to perform.

After news articles and documentary films began to explore the nature of the conservatorship, and thousands of her fans lobbied to end it as part of what became known as the #FreeBritney movement, Spears publicly denounced the arrangement two years ago.

Spears made an impassioned speech to the judge overseeing her case in which she asserted that she had been drugged and compelled to work against her will, calling the arrangement “abusive” and her treatment “traumatizing.”

“I just want my life back,” she said.

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A few months later the judge suspended James Spears from his position as overseer of her estate. And on Nov. 12, 2021, the judge ruled to end the conservatorship.

Since then, Spears, 41, has discussed aspects of her experience in Instagram posts, criticizing her father’s involvement in the arrangement, but she has not yet given a formal interview or given her full account. She mentioned the forthcoming book in a since-deleted post last year, calling the process “healing and therapeutic.”

Since the legal arrangement was terminated, Spears has announced her marriage to Sam Asghari, something she had said she was not able to do under the conservatorship, and briefly returned to the music industry, releasing a track with Elton John. Spears’ career has been relatively quiet otherwise since the high-profile court proceedings, though she offered her support for a Broadway musical centred on her music.

On the book’s website, the publisher described it as a “brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.”