The national conversation about Britney Spears’s conservatorship reached a fever pitch as I wrote I’m the Girl, and ended up serving as a touchstone for me while I crystallized my thoughts on the commodification and sexualization of teen girl’s bodies.
Spears was sixteen when Baby One More Time was released, and she was both criticized and praised for the way her sexuality was wielded in its video—or, as some supporters and detractors alike insisted, the way she wielded her sexuality in its video. Throughout the course of her career, we watched a young woman’s stratospheric rise, and as the violent machinations of a team determined to exploit and abuse her proved too much for her, we—and all the things we were content not to know at the time—decided she proved herself unworthy of fame and all its offerings, and became participants of those machinations ourselves in ways so comfortingly accessible; cruel digs, snide remarks, telling the jokes, laughing at them. We didn’t care who overheard.
When a girl is seemingly rewarded by misogynistic patriarchal power systems, those rewards perpetuate the false idea she controls the power she’s benefiting from. We never seemed to decide what we hated Britney for more: the idea she was powerful or the truth she wasn’t. A closer look might have revealed some level of our own complicity, but no one likes to admit they bear fault. It took fourteen long years for Spears’s nightmare to end—one she painstakingly and publicly relived in a final, urgent bid for her autonomy—and only seven months before we could all log onto the internet and see this:
Strange that when Spears was a teenager being held hostage by both family and management, most everyone was okay with seeing as much of her body as possible but now that a facet of her freedom presents as the expression of control over her grown body, in the where and how and why she shares it—and after everything we now know she went through—we’re sincerely asking if, you know. It might be a sign ending her conservatorship was a bad idea.
Welcome to hell.
I’ve been working here a while.
But you know that. If you signed up for this newsletter, you know my YA novels serve as a response to and indictment against deeply patriarchal and misogynistic power structures, of rape culture. You know I allow my female characters to engage with the full spectrum of their humanity, to be flawed and especially angry, rather than have them perform to likability politics to make empathy a more accessible reader response to female trauma. Despite my reputation, I’m not really here to push the boundaries of likability, but to understand the limitations of empathy, to see what happens when I offer readers a space where there is no perceived risk, nothing to lose or gain by supporting a traumatized girl in crisis, and to see if my work can tip the scales in a fictional girl’s favor. My work, for me, only exists in this success or failure, and the extent to which I internalize the latter, I think, would shock some of you.
But then I go online and I see a tweet about Britney Spears, and wonder how I ever thought I could succeed.
News:
Wednesday Books’s I’m the Girl mailers have been unleashed upon the world. Keep your eyes on my Instagram stories to see who’s meeting her.
I’m the Girl’s audiobook narrator has been announced. The Macmillan Audio team and I had a lot of intense discussions about the undertaking of this kind of narrative, reviewing some of the book’s hardest scenes to ensure the story would be sensitively rendered. Head on over to the post to see who will be voicing Georgia Avis. She’s an incredible talent.
VIRTUAL EVENT: May 19th, 2:00 - 2:30 PM ET, I will be participating in SLJ’s Day of Dialog with author Andrea L. Rogers, whose forthcoming collection Man-Made Monsters is wonderful, and librarian extraordinaire Jennifer Hubert Swan discussing ‘nail biters’ and how our work fits into or defies this categorization.
IN-PERSON EVENT with E. Lockhart at TIFA’s Motive Crime & Mystery Festival. Sunday June 5th, 12:30 PM ET, at the Concert Stage at the Harbourfront Center, Toronto. Secrets & Lies: E. Lockhart and Courtney Summers in conversation, moderated by Amanda Halfpenny. More info/buy tickets.