# The Thirteen-Year Conservatorship *A Biography of Britney Spears* — Legendary Biographies No. 044 - **Subject:** Britney Jean Spears - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Music / Pop - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 221 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 221 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 221 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-030-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-011-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/044-the-thirteen-year-conservatorship.html ## About this book Kentwood, Louisiana, 1981. A girl with a four-octave voice sings into a hairbrush in a doublewide and is told, again and again, that she is going to be somebody. By twenty-six she has sold a hundred million records, danced with a python at the VMAs, and lost custody of her two small sons. By twenty-seven, a California court has handed control of her body, her bank accounts, and her medical decisions to her father. Ailsa Rennie's biography of Britney Jean Spears follows the thirteen years that followed — a period in which Spears earned roughly $138 million while being told what she could eat, whom she could date, and which IUD would remain inside her. Drawing on court filings, label memos, and the testimony Spears finally delivered by telephone in June 2021, Lockhart reconstructs how a conservatorship designed for the elderly and the infirm came to enclose a woman at the height of her earning power. Lockhart moves between the Mickey Mouse Club soundstage, the Jive Records boardroom, the paparazzi scrum outside a Tarzana gas station, and the fan forums where strangers first began to ask whether the smiling Instagram posts were a cry for help. At its center is a question the courts spent more than a decade refusing to answer: who, exactly, was being protected, and from whom? ## Contents 1. The Memoir 2. McComb / Kentwood 3. The Talent 4. The Mickey Mouse Club 5. ...Baby One More Time 6. Justin 7. The Snake 8. Toxic 9. Federline 10. 2007 11. Custody 12. The Hold 13. The Machine 14. Circus and Vegas 15. Free Britney 16. The Testimony 17. Termination 18. The Woman in Me 19. Postscript — The Record ## Questions **Who is The Thirteen-Year Conservatorship about?** Britney Jean Spears. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Thirteen-Year Conservatorship — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,455 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 69,500 words, 19 chapters, 221 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them. Her writing uncovers forgotten archival papers to reconstruct the lived realities of intellectual collaboration. Through works like Compound S, The Fossil Hunter, and The Birkbeck Years, she examines the institutional structures that obscured female achievement. She also explores these themes of lost legacy and ownership in The Paris Radium Institute and The Letter from Madras. She lives in the Edinburgh suburbs, where she spends her weekends restoring antique bookbindings and volunteering at a local community orchard.