Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly

Music journalist Weiss (Passion of the Weiss) takes an exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears’s career in this no-holds-barred account. He traces his infatuation with the pop star from crashing the filming of her “Baby... One More Time” music video as a 16-year-old through to his coverage of Spears for the tabloid magazine Nova. Weiss reported on such highs as Spears’s domination of the Teen Choice Awards in 2003, as well as lows like her disastrous performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, her flirtations with cocaine, her public battles for custody of her children, her father’s attempts to send her to rehab, and the conservatorship she was placed under from 2008 to 2021. In colorful, entertaining detail, Weiss lucidly explains how the paparazzi capitalized on the chaos of Spears’s life to give the public the chaos they demanded. For instance, he describes how photos of Spears’s son buckled the wrong way in her car resulted in a global scandal and fueled doubts about her ability to mother her kids, and how paparazzi would sometimes bait her, leading to a supposed “psychotic break” in 2007 when she struck a photographer’s car with an umbrella. As much a thrilling chronicle of Spears’s life as it is a perceptive examination of celebrity culture, this captivates. (June)