Britney Spears’ book The Woman in Me: Everything you need to know

Britney Spears' long-awaited memoir The Woman In Me lands on shelves today. Photos / AP

Britney Spears’ hotly anticipated memoir The Woman In Me is finally set to hit shelves after already topping bestseller charts.

Arriving in New Zealand tomorrow, it’s Spears’ first official memoir, though she has already written two books with her mother Lynne. She reportedly started writing it shortly after her 13-year conservatorship ended.

Several leaked chapters from the book have already made headlines with shocking revelations about her family and relationships, including the fact that while she was with Justin Timberlake, she had an abortion.

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. Photo / AP

But the pop star says the book wasn’t written to “offend anyone”. She wrote online, “Most of the book is from 20 years ago… I have moved on and it’s a beautiful clean slate from here!”

Overseas, the book is tipped to be the biggest book release since Prince Harry’s explosive memoir Spare - but are Kiwis lining up to buy it?

A spokesperson for Unity Books in Auckland told the Herald they have ordered a “reasonable quantity” of copies but had no pre-orders. A staff member at Time Out Bookstore in Mt Eden said there hadn’t been “active interest” from customers leading up to the release, but they had ordered 24 copies in hopes of selling them all.

Whether or not you’re lining up to buy it, many of the revelations in the book have already made headlines - so, here are some of the biggest bombshells Spears has shared within its pages.

Spears became ‘child-robot’ under her conservatorship

The pop star goes into detail about life under the court-ordered conservatorship masterminded by her father Jamie Spears, which started in 2008.

Spears says she became “a sort of child-robot” during this time, writing, “I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself ... [it] stripped me of my womanhood”.

Later in the book, she writes that she did not challenge the conservatorship because she wanted to be with her children.

“I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to,” she writes. “And so I went along with it.”

“My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”

Men ‘looked her up and down’ during auditions as a teenager

Spears signed her first record deal at the age of 15, and started auditioning with several labels.

She recalls performing Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing in front of “a room full of men in suits looking me up and down in my small dress and high heels; I sang loud”.

Spears also looks back on her experience in the public eye as a young female compared to her male peers. Everyone wanted “to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery”, she remembers, while Timberlake wasn’t asked such personal questions.

Britney Spears performs with a snake during the finale of the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards in New York. Photo / AP

Spears thought she would die during iconic VMAs performance

Who could forget the pop star’s 2001 MTV VMAs show, during which she sang with a python around her shoulders?

She planned to sing I’m a Slave 4 U with the snake “as a prop”, but writes in her book that it was “even more terrifying than it appeared”.

Spears continues, “the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing” - and she avoided catching its eye because she feared “it would kill” her.

Spears felt ‘exploited’ in 2003 Diane Sawyer interview

In the pop star’s infamous Primetime interview with Diane Sawyer in 2003 she was pressured to answer invasive questions, and Spears now says she felt it was a “breaking point” for her.

“I felt like I had been exploited, set up in front of the whole world,” she writes.

Sawyer pressed her with questions about her split from Timberlake and whether she had cheated on him, as well as whether her “provocative” style made her a good role model for young girls.

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake accused each other of cheating during their relationship. Photo / Getty Images

The truth about her relationship with Justin Timberlake

Last week, the news broke that Spears secretly had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake. In the book, she reveals that he was “so sure he didn’t want to be a father” that she felt she had no choice but to end the pregnancy, calling the experience “agonising”.

She also recalls his 2002 music vido for Cry Me a River, which depicts a woman cheating on him. The video generated backlash against Spears for “breaking his heart” when they split, but she writes that in reality, she was “comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood”.

As for those cheating allegations, she confirms that she kissed choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she also writes that he was unfaithful with “another celebrity” whom she refuses to name, but who is widely thought to be Nicole Appleton.

Spears’ two-week fling with Colin Farrell

After her 2002 split from Timberlake, Spears delved into a two-week romance with Irish actor Colin Farrell.

The pair met when he was filming 2003 action film S.W.A.T. but Spears didn’t want to get “too attached” - in the book, she describes the fling as a “two-week brawl ... we were all over each other, grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight”.

The real reason Spears shaved her head

Spears famously shaved her head in 2007, and she’s now revealed that “shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back”.

“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” she writes in her memoir.

At the time, her custody battle for her kids and grief were also weighing on the pop star, as she admits, “I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”