Just one week ahead of the release of her first memoir, The Woman In Me, Britney Spears is giving the world a taste of the revelations coming in the book. These kinds of shocking teases, usually dropped in the media shortly before books arrive in stores, are a tried-and-true method publishers use to help sell copies, and Spears and her team are following this successful game plan perfectly.
On October 17, People published an exclusive excerpt from The Woman In Me that immediately went viral. The magazine, which features the singer on the cover, shared a snippet from the memoir in which Spears admits for the first time that she had an abortion when she was just a teenager.
The teaser sees Spears sharing that she became pregnant more than 20 years ago while she was dating fellow pop superstar Justin Timberlake. The pair were one of the most high-profile couples in Hollywood for a few years while they were both at the height of their careers. They split in 2002, and since then, both musicians have gone on to marry others and start families of their own.
Spears’s abortion story has quickly become the top story in the entertainment media today—and beyond. Google
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“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” the “Toxic” chart-topper said about the pregnancy in the excerpt. “I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” Spears shared in the book, per People. She went on to add that while she was apparently happy with the pregnancy, her partner didn’t feel the same.
“But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” Spears writes. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.” Spears says then that she had the abortion, but that it wasn’t entirely her choice. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” the Grammy winner confided in the tell-all, adding, “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Sadly, Spears isn’t happy about the choice she made. “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life,” she says in The Woman In Me. Since Timberlake and Spears broke up, she has become a mother twice. She has two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.
It was always understood that Spears’s memoir would contain bombshells, as that’s likely why her publisher, Simon & Schuster, paid a whopping $15 million for her story. It seems that every media outlet is covering the snippet, which will only help the singer and her publisher sell more copies of the book. The Woman In Me was likely always going to be a bestseller, but after today’s story, pre-sales will almost certainly increase significantly.
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