The Re-Recordings
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Read the opening free
3,455 words · no email, no account
No. 044 · Music · Pop
The Thirteen-Year Conservatorship
a biography of Britney Jean Spears
What the book is
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?
At a glance
- Subject
- Britney Jean Spears
- Shelf
- Music · Pop
- Written by
- Ailsa Rennie
- Chapters
- 19 across 221 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The MemoirRead free
- 02McComb / Kentwood4,515 words
- 03The Talent3,366 words
- 04The Mickey Mouse Club3,112 words
- 05...Baby One More Time3,830 words
- 06Justin3,401 words
- 07The Snake3,618 words
- 08Toxic3,833 words
- 09Federline3,852 words
- 1020073,268 words
- 11Custody3,681 words
- 12The Hold3,725 words
- 13The Machine2,851 words
- 14Circus and Vegas3,611 words
- 15Free Britney3,300 words
- 16The Testimony2,761 words
- 17Termination3,154 words
- 18The Woman in Me4,964 words
- 19Postscript — The Record3,400 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 69,500 words, 19 chapters, 221 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
