Ghost Child

Britney Spears suffered so many forms of injustice when she was under legal conservatorship. She had to tour even when she didn’t want to. She had to perform nightly in Vegas and wasn’t allowed to change any of the choreography. She couldn’t drive a car, her first dates had to submit to blood tests and background checks, and she didn’t have control of her own money. (Once, she tried to pay for dinner for her backup dancers and she didn’t have enough in her allowance account to cover the check — mortifying.) After more than a decade of this, she was institutionalized against her will. That last one was a living nightmare, but it was the little stuff that, as she writes in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, “put my fire out.” The thing that really bothered her was when her family would drink in front of her, while she “wasn’t even allowed a sip of Jack and Coke.”