Britney Spears’ memoir provides her take on the legal guardianship she experienced for much of her adult life, along with the struggles she faced with her mental health. One of the main points of the book is how vulnerable and helpless she felt when it came to agreeing to the guardianship. While she really didn’t want to accept it, she was concerned that she could end up losing access to her young children if she refused.

That led her to comply with the wishes of her father, who was in charge of her and her career during the guardianship. While this was expected to be short-term support, Spears ended up trapped in the guardianship for more than a decade. During that time, she says, she had very little freedom to do any of the things she wanted or needed to do, and had to follow rules and regulations created by her father under the guise of protecting her and her interests.

Essentially, Spears recounts, she traded her freedom for the opportunity to see her children. She felt like she was being exploited by her father, and struggled to come to terms with that. At the same time, she had a public image that was quite different from the way she was living her life when she wasn’t in front of a camera or on a stage. The ways her life changed altered how she felt about music, and also created some complex dynamics with past partners, such as Justin Timberlake.

Now that the book has hit shelves, Spears is detailing and sharing much of the “robotic” life she lived for 13 years, where she says she was treated like an infant and started to lose touch with a lot of who she actually was. The level of scrutiny she received as a child star was very difficult, and having the guardianship brought back much of that feeling of not having control over her life and how she wanted to live it.

The biggest takeaway from the book is likely how Spears has managed to regain some sense of autonomy and normalcy, even in a lifetime that was forever changed by the control others exerted over her in the past.

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