Excerpts from Spears's memoir were published by People on Oct. 17. The singer shares details about how she was deeply impacted by her years-long conservatorship. She writes that during that time she felt like "a shadow of myself." "This is what's hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom," the book reads. "There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn't treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn't allow me to be an adult."
She adds: "The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist."
