Britney Spears Sets Herself Free in New Memoir—Will It Backfire?

In 2004, not long after her wildly successful Onyx Hotel Tour and her marriage to Kevin Federline, Britney Spears wrote a letter on her website. The pop icon, then at the height of her fame, announced that she would be taking some much-needed time off.

In her new memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears recalls that back then, she wrote to her fans that she’d “actually learned to say ‘NO!’” But that power had already come at a cost. “With this newly found freedom,” Spears wrote, “it’s like people don’t know how to act around me. … Going and going and going is all I’ve ever known since I was fifteen years old.”

Going and going and going might be the best way to describe how it feels to read The Woman in Me—a dizzying tell-all that captures the surreal pace of Spear’s life while also (somehow) stringing all that curlicued surreality into one coherent narrative.

Read more at The Daily Beast.