Trauma and drama: Britney Spears and the risky business of celebrity memoirs

"Justin definitely wasn't happy about the pregnancy," writes Britney Spears in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, reminiscing about her short-lived relationship with fellow musician Justin Timberlake. 

"And so I'm sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby."

The Woman in Me doesn't stop the whiplash reveals there. Following a description of the "excruciating … unbelievable" pain caused by the abortion pills, Spears writes of wanting more than anything to go see a doctor. But instead of getting her medical attention, Spears claims Timberlake took a different approach. 

"[T]hey didn't take me to the hospital. Justin came into the bathroom and lay on the floor with me," she wrote. "At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it."

That raw and shocking admission is typical of a celebrity memoir. But while excerpts like that helped propel Spears's book to the top of the Amazon bestseller list after its release this week, it's simply set dressing. Just a few pages later, she gets into her real focus: clashes with reporters; the media's focus on her body and sexuality above her musicality; and the shame and guilt her family caused her. 

The book, like the tidal wave of others coming from famous faces, serves a different purpose than the prior generation of celebrity memoirs and autobiographies. In the past, memoirs operated as a sober reflection on a full career at its close. Now, influential figures are putting out memoirs often in the middle of their careers, as a tool to regain control of the narratives of their own lives.

"Celebrities, public figures, the media is always writing things about them — people are always speaking about them," said Tobi Nifesi, a Vancouver-based ghostwriter. "And so sometimes they want to take back that control by changing the narrative, or putting out the accurate stories — and a book is a way for them to do that."

Nifesi, who says he has worked on several memoirs for public figures, says the vast majority of celebrity memoirs are ghostwritten. He said he used to receive job offers for mostly business and psychology books, but in the past couple of years, it has shifted so much to memoirs that they're almost exclusively what he works on.

He said the reason for that, especially for celebrities, is the immense value of controlling their own story. 

The celebrity memoir is about as old as celebrity itself — French actor Sarah Bernhardt, often considered the first modern celebrity, was also arguably the author of the world's first such book, My Double Life, published in 1899.

Since then, the memoir has virtually taken over non-fiction publishing. BookNet Canada, a non-profit trade organization, doesn't specifically track celebrity memoirs, but a 2016 study found that biography sales had consistently risen even as non-fiction sales fell — as of 2022, biography and memoir was the best-selling category of non-fiction. 

Meanwhile, the six most expensive book deals ever have been for memoirs, according to Statista. (They include Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Amy Schumer's The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo and Spears's The Woman in Me.) As of this week, three of the New York Times' non-fiction bestsellers are memoirs. 

John Stamos's memoir If You Would Have Told Me was released the same day as Spears's, and similarly dominated headlines, with revelations about his alleged sexual abuse as a minor by a babysitter and the TV career of his ex-wife Rebecca Romijn.

Jada Pinkett Smith's Worthy was released last week, and we can expect memoirs from Barbra Streisand, Henry Winkler, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Patrick Stewart and Julia Fox in the coming weeks.