Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back together with the word you write all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun. When you write your story, you get the words and said, don't you think it's time to let him out? And write them down and cover what it's all about and write, Write your story, Write you write your story.

Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back together with the word you write all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun. When you write your story, you get the words and said, don't you think it's time to let him out? And write them down and cover what it's all about and write, Write your story, Write you write your story.

Hi, writers, welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. My name is Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to do a review of the new Britney Spears memoir. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I did a similar episode when Prince Harry's memoir came out. I resisted reading that memoir for a long time and then decided to read it through the lens of how well does he tell the story? And I want to do the same thing with the Britney Spears memoir. This is not necessarily like is this a good book? Is it not a good book? I want to talk about the memoir through the lens of how well she follows the story arc and I want to just share my thoughts on what makes this story work and what parts of it I feel like could have been improved on to make the story even more compelling or even stronger. Now, one thing we have to talk about before I kick off, because I'm reviewing another celebrity memoir is that this book is ghost written. And I talked a lot about ghostwriting when I shared Prince Harry's memoir. I'll talk a little bit about it here too. One question that I get asked a lot is how do I know if a book was ghost written? So I kind of want to walk you through the process that I take knowing what's happening inside of the publishing industry. This is like a little bit of an insider's view to how I know whether a book is ghost written. Right off the bat, the first thing that I do to know if a book was ghost written is I look on the cover, because sometimes the ghostwriter is mentioned on the cover of a book. If the ghost writers mentioned on the cover of the book, it will usually say the author's name, and then underneath of it in small letters, it'll say with or sometimes it'll say and, and then it'll have the ghostwriter's name. A lot of times with celebrity memoirs, they don't include their ghost writer on the cover. I've tried to figure out a pattern for why certain people include the ghostwriter on the cover and other people don't, and I don't think that there's a clear pattern because I can tell you as a ghostwriter myself. I've done a lot of ghostwriting in my career, and it's not always the author who says I don't want to put my ghostwriter on the cover. Sometimes it's the ghostwriter who says, I would rather just stay a silent partner in this. I would rather not have my name on the cover of your book because I'm not trying to align with what you're talking about, or I'm not trying to build a brand inside of your subject matter. So I'm just here as a silent partner to help you get the job done. I'm kind of here for the paycheck. I'm here because this is my gift, but I'm not trying to make a name for myself as a ghostwriter. So that can be one reason why a ghostwriter isn't on the cover of the book. I also do think certain times there's some truth to the fact that certain authors would prefer for it to appear as if they've written the book by themselves. But I think in Britney's case, that's probably not true because she does acknowledge her ghostwriter. And same for Prince Harry, who obviously Prince Harry's ghostwriter wrote a piece in What Was at USA Today. I linked to it in the episode where he talks about his experience writing the book. So no one's trying to keep this like a massive secret that there's a ghostwriter. It's just not necessarily acknowledged on directly on the cover of the book. One thing I find interesting about acknowledging ghostwriters on the cover of the book is probably if you don't work in publishing, and if you hadn't heard someone explain this to you before, you wouldn't go into a bookstore and notice that there's that name under the author's name. So you probably would go pick up Harry Schultz's book The CEO of Starbucks, and you would miss the fact that there's a with or an and underneath of his name. The only people who are really looking for that are publishing professionals or anyone who has kind of inside information. If the ghost writer isn't listed on the cover of the book, the second place that you can look is in the acknowledgments Matthew Perry, for example, mentions his ghostwriter in the acknowledgments. There are some other authors whose memoirs I've read who mention their ghostwriter in the acknowledgments. When you look at the acknowledgments of Britney's memoir, she mentions her collaborators and just says you know who you are, which clued me into the fact that there probably was a ghostwriter or maybe a couple of people who supported her in the writing process. And also with most celebrity memoirs, you can kind of imagine that there's probably a ghostwriter. But that's one step that I usually take if I'm wondering if there was a ghostwriter, is to check their acknowledgements at the end of the book. And then the third thing that you can do if you don't see anyone in the acknowledgements is simply google it. And when you google did Britney Spears have a go ghost writer? You learn that Sam Lansky was her ghostwriter. So yes, she did have a ghostwriter for this project. And the reason that I bring this up is it's a little bit of a different conversation if a book has a ghostwriter versus not I mean, in some ways it's exactly the same. It's not one hundred percent different, because we're still asking the question, how's the story put together? But it gets a little convoluted because it's like, well, Brittany didn't make the decision to put the story together in this way, or maybe she did. Who was it? Was it the ghostwriter or was it Brittany? It doesn't really matter. At the end of the day. What I'm going to be talking about is how well is the story put together? What really works about this story, and what parts of it don't work as well. Another thing I want to address about a celebrity memoir versus your memoir, because there are some really key differences. One main key difference from a celebrity memoir to your memoir is that you can't just write down what happened and expect people to find it interesting. A celebrity, a public figure, someone who we follow in the media can do that. They can in some ways put anything they want in the book and we will still find it interesting. That's not always one hundred percent true. I think a celebrity still needs to think really critically about how they put the book together. And I think most celebrities really do. They want to express themselves creatively, They want to tell the truth, they want to put something together that's really interesting and entertaining for people. But at the end of the day, the big reason that we're picking up the book from a celebrity is because of the name. It's because we already know pieces to the story and we're looking to fill in the blinks where we don't know the answers. There are already story loops that are open for us with celebrities that we're wanting to close. And when you're writing your memoir, you just don't have all of those luxuries. So when you're writing your memoir, you have to think more critically about how the story is put together, what details you share and don't share. The details you leave out are absolutely as important as the ones that you put in, because a reader, when they read your memoir a person who they don't know, are reading it in a really different way than they would read a celebrity memoir. But of course, Britney Spears is not just your average girl on the block. She is the queen of pop. She is for those of us who were born in the eighties, you know, we grew up with her. She's iconic, she's symbolic of what it means to go from a girl to a woman. And I think it's perfect that her book is titled The Woman in Me. In fact, this is one of the first things that I want to talk about about. What works really, really well about the book is the narrative arc. Either Britney or her ghostwriter did a fantastic job of crafting the narrative arc. Britney's transformation is clear even in the title of the book. The title of the book is The Woman in Me, and what we know from reading that title is that we're going to go on a journey following Brittany from being a young girl all the way to becoming the woman that she is today. And of course, just as you would expect, when you open up the book, the first thing that you're going to read is a short snippet about what it was like for her to be a girl. In her first paragraph of the prologue, she says, as a little girl, I walked for hours alone in the silent woods behind my house in Louisiana, singing songs. Being outside gave me a sense of a liveness and danger when I was growing up, my mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home. Outside wasn't necessarily heaven, but it was my world. Call it heaven or hell. It was mine. And this is a spoiler alert, but you'll see if you read the book that in the very last paragraph of the last chapter of the book, she revisits that moment of wandering in the woods as a child. She says, I can't change the past, but I don't have to be lonely or scared anymore. I've been through so much since I wandered the Louisiana woods as a child. I've made music, traveled all over the world, become a mother, found love and lost it. Founded again. It's been a while since I felt truly present in my own life, in my own power, in my own womanhood. But I'm here now. So notice how she started and ended in the same place, but made it very clear to the reader that there's been a transformation. She's gone from being a girl to being a woman, and that's reflected in the title of the book too. That narrative arc is really strong. It holds the entire thing together very cohesively. I think whether that was Brittany or whether it was her ghostwriter, they did a fantastic job of setting that narrative arc from the very beginning, so that you know exactly what path you're following from the start of the book to the finish. Another thing that she did a really amazing job of is inserting clear guides into the story. When I talk about guides as they relate to personal storytelling, I say that one of the reasons guides are so significant is because we do I don't believe that the hero could have made it through the darkness that they did without the guide. We don't believe that the hero could have transformed if they didn't have a guide to help them transform. And I think that's really true for Britney's story. Think about, if you haven't read the book, even the parts of her story that you know to be true from watching in the media. You see her shave her head, the iconic image of her in the front seat of her car with her son in her lap while the paparazza or chasing her. You see the image of her going under the conservatorship. All the things that have happened to her. You have to wonder like, how did she survive this? How did she get out of this darkness? How did she get out of this mess? And she does a really good job of entering guides into the story. She talks about Madonna being a guide for her and really teaching her what it looked like to speak up for herself and advocate for herself and ask for what she needed. She talks about Reese Witherspoon being the very image of peace and calm and sort of put togetherness. She talks about a family friend named Felicia, who she called Fay, who did a lot of traveling with her while she was on tour. She talks about Paris Hilton really meeting her in a time of need and helping her. And she talks about the women who she meets in AA. She starts going to AA at the demands of her father, but ends up really falling in love with these women who she meets in AA who become a huge support to her. So each of those guides who show up in different chapters of the book help her have some sort of transformation, some sort of epiphany, some sort of just hope and light that they bring to the story that help you, as a reader, make sense of how she gets from one step to another. The other thing that I think really works about the manuscript is that the entire thing reads in Brittany's voice, which is really challenging to do. Even if you don't have a ghostwriter, it can be challenging to get your voice to translate from your speaking voice to the page. I have worked laboriously at length with authors over the years who are really gifted speakers but have a hard time getting their voice to show up on the page. It's a challenge, and it's even more challenging when you have a ghostwriter, because you have to find such symbiosis between the ghostwriter and the author that the ghostwriter is able to capture your voice, and even when they're writing sections for you, they're getting that voice to show up on the page. It is not easy. It takes a lot of time, just hours logged with ghostwriter and author together in the same room, so that you can almost take on the identity of the person that you're writing for and just translate the way that they would say something to the page. I know from experience how difficult this can be, and I think her ghostwriter did an absolutely phenomenal job. I would be very curious to know what their process was like, and I probably will never get to know the answer to that question. But every author does this a little bit differently. So do you have the author write sections first and send it to the ghostwriter to edit? Does the ghostwriter write first and send it to the author to edit? Do you sit down and do it together. Does Brittany speak into an audio file and send it to the ghostwriter and the ghostwriter translates that to the written word. There are so many different ways to do this, and it's a different process for each author based on what works well for them. And just major kudos to the ghostwriter who did a phenomenal job with this great job. So those are three things that I think work really well for the manuscript. There are a handful of things I think don't work as well, and I'd like to go through those. Also. The first thing that I think didn't really work is there's a lack of what I would call a narrator voice inside of the manuscript. Narrator voice, to me is the voice of the transformed author that's telling the story. This can get confusing for people because you are if you're writing a personal narrative. You're both the hero of the story and you're also the narrator of the story, but it's almost like two separate parts of you. There's the hero who's trapped in the dark time, who can't see their way out, who doesn't know how to solve this problem, who has obstacles and villains in their way. And then there's the narrator of the story, who sees the story from a thirty thousand foot view, who understands the whole perspective, who doesn't feel trapped, who is absolutely free, who's able to help the hero navigate the story and also help the reader navigate the story. So that the reader doesn't get lost in the myopic sort of dark details that were relating to them. The reader needs to hear those dark details through the lens of the narrator who's saying, don't worry, this is not where the story ends. I'm taking you somewhere wonderful. And if that narrator of voice isn't there, I find the reader has much less patience for the darkness than they would otherwise. Like I mentioned a minute ago, the narrative arc is so strong inside of the book, and based on the narrative arc that's set by the author and by the ghostwriter, we're expecting this transformation to be from a little girl to a strong, confident woman who stands on her own two feet. But the question that I had reading the book is where is the voice of that woman throughout? In other words, in that last paragraph that I read from the very last page of the book, you hear Britney say I'm this strong confident woman now. But I didn't find that her confidence was clearly portrayed throughout each chapter of the book. And you might be thinking, well, of course it's not clearly betrayed because she hasn't transformed into that woman yet. But that's the narrator voice that I'm talking about. You want that narrator voice to be present slowly throughout the entire book, so that the reader can see the destination that we're going to reach. You never want the reader to feel like they see the hero better than the narrator sees the hero. You want the narrator to be the one who says, I didn't see that then, but I see it now. And even something as simple as that, even that phrasing, can help the reader to see that there is a narrator who's transformed, who's guiding this process, even though we haven't gotten there yet. There are a couple of points when her narrative voice comes through really clearly, and I think she actually makes a few really amazing points. One of my favorite points that she makes in the entire thing is on the first page of chapter thirty one, where she says the conservatorship was created supposedly because I was incapable of doing anything at all, feeding myself, spending my own money, being a mother, anything. So why was it that a few weeks later they had me shoot an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then sent me on a grueling world tour. That is a really amazing example of the clarity of narrator voice. I wanted more and more and more of that narrator voice throughout the manuscript, and I just didn't get as much of it as I wanted. Another amazing example of narrator voice is on page one twenty, where she's talking about being attacked or chased by these paparazzo and she turns to one of them on camera and says, this is why I need a gun. I said to the camera, which probably didn't go over that well, but I was at my wits end. The magazines seemed to love nothing more than a photo they could run with the headline Britney Spears got huge look she's not wearing makeup, as if those two things were some kind of sin, as if gaining weight was something unkind I'd done to them personally, a betrayal. At what point did I promise to stay seventeen for the rest of my life? And I just think that's such an amazing job of narrator voice. Notice how what she does there is she tells a story where she says, I told the paparazzi this is why I need a gun, and then she said to the reader it probably didn't go over that well. I shouldn't have said that is what she's saying. And then she also says as if gaining weight was some kind of sin, as if this was something unkind I'd done to them personally. That's her narrative voice. That's the strength of her as a woman and her confidence coming through. That's not the child voice speaking, that's her grown woman voice speaking. And yet I just wanted more of that throughout the manuscript. I didn't feel like there was enough to satisfy my craving for it. Another thing that she did in the manuscript she slash her ghostwriter that I didn't think worked very well, and I never think this works very well. Is I'm going to call it name calling or it's actually really assuming that you understand the intention of why other characters in your story did what they did. And I'm not saying this as a slam to Brittany at all or to her ghostwriter. I'm more talking about this as a technique with writing that will make your writing much more powerful. That it's, in my opinion, lazy writing to use something as simple as name calling. So there are a couple instances in the manuscript where she calls her sister a bitch or ungrateful or a witch. She calls her family terrible, she calls Justin Timberlake some names, and she even says, people don't understand why I have so much anger toward my parents, And she said, I think if they had been through what I've been through, they would understand. And of course they would understand. When you understand what she's been through, you do understand her anger. And yet I think name calling is a lazy way to write about what has happened to you. And whereas a celebrity might be able to get away with something like that, I think it's actually more difficult for the average person to get away with name calling. What ends up happening is you lose your credibility with your reader, you lose your relatability, you lose their support of you when you call someone else a name. And to be fair, I think Brittany has a heart of gold as she name calls even herself. In the manuscript, on page one sixty four, she says, I mean, I'll say it, I was bad, And in my opinion, a good ghost writer should have edited that part out, because when you are writing a first draft of a personal narrative, you will find yourself saying stuff like that. You'll find yourself saying, like, you know, he was such an ahole or whatever, or I was such a whatever. But there's always an evolution beyond calling someone a name or naming someone as something. That is a more powerful way to tell the story than just using that word. And I think that we could have stretched the manuscript even further if we had gone there and along those same lines. Anytime that you're writing about someone and you find yourself tempted to fill in the blank for why they did what they did, my advice would be to stop yourself, because you are not an omniscient narrator. You don't know why other people in your story did what they did. You only know why you did what you did, and you can talk about how you felt about it, you can talk about how you interpreted it, but you can't really say they did that because they hated me, or they did that because they wanted to make me suffer, because you don't know if they did it because they wanted to make you suffer. There's no way for you to possibly know that unless you have them saying to you that that's why they did it, and even then you can't fully understand someone else's motives for doing what they did. So, in my opinion, I'm not making a statement about whether it's morally wrong or right to name call. I'm simply saying that if you want to stretch your writing and make your writing stronger, avoid name calling, avoid assuming that you know why other people did what they did, and stretch yourself to speak from your own perspective and to say something richer than just calling someone a name. I thought several times I was reading her memoir that this must have been really healing for her to write it, and I'm really glad that she got to share her own story in her own words. I think a couple other things that really worked about the manuscript that are just really practical, were the short chapters. In my experience in publishing ten years ago, short chapters used to be really frowned upon, and I'm finding them more and more being used, and I find them to be really helpful for a reader's attention span because if you can blow through three or four chapters in a sitting, you know, each chapter's only a couple pages long, so it's really easy to get through a couple chapters, and you can feel like you're making a lot of progress through the manuscript as the reader, and it's really compelling and motivating to keep on reading. I also think, you know, just as someone who has followed loosely Britney's career throughout the last two decades, she answered all the questions I wanted her to answer. She filled in all the blanks that I wanted her to fill in. She told the story. Really honestly, she strikes me as a person who has an absolute heart of gold, who would never intentionally hurt anybody, who, you know, like any of us, has her faults and has her own blind spots, but who genuinely is a really loving person and wants to do right by the people that she loves. And I'm really glad that she had the opportunity to tell her story in her own words, because I have to imagine that it was really healing for her after everything she's been through, similar to Prince Harry, you know, Brittany. A lot of why Brittany has suffered has been because of the family that she was born into, and also just the public career that she's had, the public life that she's had, and feeling like she didn't really have control over her own life or her own narrative. And so I can only imagine how healing it must have been for her to be able to put this story down on paper in her own words, and that in and of itself, is a really beautiful thing to watch. I do think it's worth reading, especially if you're a Britney Spears fan. I don't think that the prose is going to blow your mind. It's not going to be the most you know, like poetic thing that you've ever read, but it is a really well shaped story, an interesting story for anyone who has followed her career, and I absolutely recommend reading it.

Hi, writers, welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. My name is Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to do a review of the new Britney Spears memoir. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I did a similar episode when Prince Harry's memoir came out. I resisted reading that memoir for a long time and then decided to read it through the lens of how well does he tell the story? And I want to do the same thing with the Britney Spears memoir. This is not necessarily like is this a good book? Is it not a good book? I want to talk about the memoir through the lens of how well she follows the story arc and I want to just share my thoughts on what makes this story work and what parts of it I feel like could have been improved on to make the story even more compelling or even stronger. Now, one thing we have to talk about before I kick off, because I'm reviewing another celebrity memoir is that this book is ghost written. And I talked a lot about ghostwriting when I shared Prince Harry's memoir. I'll talk a little bit about it here too. One question that I get asked a lot is how do I know if a book was ghost written? So I kind of want to walk you through the process that I take knowing what's happening inside of the publishing industry. This is like a little bit of an insider's view to how I know whether a book is ghost written. Right off the bat, the first thing that I do to know if a book was ghost written is I look on the cover, because sometimes the ghostwriter is mentioned on the cover of a book. If the ghost writers mentioned on the cover of the book, it will usually say the author's name, and then underneath of it in small letters, it'll say with or sometimes it'll say and, and then it'll have the ghostwriter's name. A lot of times with celebrity memoirs, they don't include their ghost writer on the cover. I've tried to figure out a pattern for why certain people include the ghostwriter on the cover and other people don't, and I don't think that there's a clear pattern because I can tell you as a ghostwriter myself. I've done a lot of ghostwriting in my career, and it's not always the author who says I don't want to put my ghostwriter on the cover. Sometimes it's the ghostwriter who says, I would rather just stay a silent partner in this. I would rather not have my name on the cover of your book because I'm not trying to align with what you're talking about, or I'm not trying to build a brand inside of your subject matter. So I'm just here as a silent partner to help you get the job done. I'm kind of here for the paycheck. I'm here because this is my gift, but I'm not trying to make a name for myself as a ghostwriter. So that can be one reason why a ghostwriter isn't on the cover of the book. I also do think certain times there's some truth to the fact that certain authors would prefer for it to appear as if they've written the book by themselves. But I think in Britney's case, that's probably not true because she does acknowledge her ghostwriter. And same for Prince Harry, who obviously Prince Harry's ghostwriter wrote a piece in What Was at USA Today. I linked to it in the episode where he talks about his experience writing the book. So no one's trying to keep this like a massive secret that there's a ghostwriter. It's just not necessarily acknowledged on directly on the cover of the book. One thing I find interesting about acknowledging ghostwriters on the cover of the book is probably if you don't work in publishing, and if you hadn't heard someone explain this to you before, you wouldn't go into a bookstore and notice that there's that name under the author's name. So you probably would go pick up Harry Schultz's book The CEO of Starbucks, and you would miss the fact that there's a with or an and underneath of his name. The only people who are really looking for that are publishing professionals or anyone who has kind of inside information. If the ghost writer isn't listed on the cover of the book, the second place that you can look is in the acknowledgments Matthew Perry, for example, mentions his ghostwriter in the acknowledgments. There are some other authors whose memoirs I've read who mention their ghostwriter in the acknowledgments. When you look at the acknowledgments of Britney's memoir, she mentions her collaborators and just says you know who you are, which clued me into the fact that there probably was a ghostwriter or maybe a couple of people who supported her in the writing process. And also with most celebrity memoirs, you can kind of imagine that there's probably a ghostwriter. But that's one step that I usually take if I'm wondering if there was a ghostwriter, is to check their acknowledgements at the end of the book. And then the third thing that you can do if you don't see anyone in the acknowledgements is simply google it. And when you google did Britney Spears have a go ghost writer? You learn that Sam Lansky was her ghostwriter. So yes, she did have a ghostwriter for this project. And the reason that I bring this up is it's a little bit of a different conversation if a book has a ghostwriter versus not I mean, in some ways it's exactly the same. It's not one hundred percent different, because we're still asking the question, how's the story put together? But it gets a little convoluted because it's like, well, Brittany didn't make the decision to put the story together in this way, or maybe she did. Who was it? Was it the ghostwriter or was it Brittany? It doesn't really matter. At the end of the day. What I'm going to be talking about is how well is the story put together? What really works about this story, and what parts of it don't work as well. Another thing I want to address about a celebrity memoir versus your memoir, because there are some really key differences. One main key difference from a celebrity memoir to your memoir is that you can't just write down what happened and expect people to find it interesting. A celebrity, a public figure, someone who we follow in the media can do that. They can in some ways put anything they want in the book and we will still find it interesting. That's not always one hundred percent true. I think a celebrity still needs to think really critically about how they put the book together. And I think most celebrities really do. They want to express themselves creatively, They want to tell the truth, they want to put something together that's really interesting and entertaining for people. But at the end of the day, the big reason that we're picking up the book from a celebrity is because of the name. It's because we already know pieces to the story and we're looking to fill in the blinks where we don't know the answers. There are already story loops that are open for us with celebrities that we're wanting to close. And when you're writing your memoir, you just don't have all of those luxuries. So when you're writing your memoir, you have to think more critically about how the story is put together, what details you share and don't share. The details you leave out are absolutely as important as the ones that you put in, because a reader, when they read your memoir a person who they don't know, are reading it in a really different way than they would read a celebrity memoir. But of course, Britney Spears is not just your average girl on the block. She is the queen of pop. She is for those of us who were born in the eighties, you know, we grew up with her. She's iconic, she's symbolic of what it means to go from a girl to a woman. And I think it's perfect that her book is titled The Woman in Me. In fact, this is one of the first things that I want to talk about about. What works really, really well about the book is the narrative arc. Either Britney or her ghostwriter did a fantastic job of crafting the narrative arc. Britney's transformation is clear even in the title of the book. The title of the book is The Woman in Me, and what we know from reading that title is that we're going to go on a journey following Brittany from being a young girl all the way to becoming the woman that she is today. And of course, just as you would expect, when you open up the book, the first thing that you're going to read is a short snippet about what it was like for her to be a girl. In her first paragraph of the prologue, she says, as a little girl, I walked for hours alone in the silent woods behind my house in Louisiana, singing songs. Being outside gave me a sense of a liveness and danger when I was growing up, my mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home. Outside wasn't necessarily heaven, but it was my world. Call it heaven or hell. It was mine. And this is a spoiler alert, but you'll see if you read the book that in the very last paragraph of the last chapter of the book, she revisits that moment of wandering in the woods as a child. She says, I can't change the past, but I don't have to be lonely or scared anymore. I've been through so much since I wandered the Louisiana woods as a child. I've made music, traveled all over the world, become a mother, found love and lost it. Founded again. It's been a while since I felt truly present in my own life, in my own power, in my own womanhood. But I'm here now. So notice how she started and ended in the same place, but made it very clear to the reader that there's been a transformation. She's gone from being a girl to being a woman, and that's reflected in the title of the book too. That narrative arc is really strong. It holds the entire thing together very cohesively. I think whether that was Brittany or whether it was her ghostwriter, they did a fantastic job of setting that narrative arc from the very beginning, so that you know exactly what path you're following from the start of the book to the finish. Another thing that she did a really amazing job of is inserting clear guides into the story. When I talk about guides as they relate to personal storytelling, I say that one of the reasons guides are so significant is because we do I don't believe that the hero could have made it through the darkness that they did without the guide. We don't believe that the hero could have transformed if they didn't have a guide to help them transform. And I think that's really true for Britney's story. Think about, if you haven't read the book, even the parts of her story that you know to be true from watching in the media. You see her shave her head, the iconic image of her in the front seat of her car with her son in her lap while the paparazza or chasing her. You see the image of her going under the conservatorship. All the things that have happened to her. You have to wonder like, how did she survive this? How did she get out of this darkness? How did she get out of this mess? And she does a really good job of entering guides into the story. She talks about Madonna being a guide for her and really teaching her what it looked like to speak up for herself and advocate for herself and ask for what she needed. She talks about Reese Witherspoon being the very image of peace and calm and sort of put togetherness. She talks about a family friend named Felicia, who she called Fay, who did a lot of traveling with her while she was on tour. She talks about Paris Hilton really meeting her in a time of need and helping her. And she talks about the women who she meets in AA. She starts going to AA at the demands of her father, but ends up really falling in love with these women who she meets in AA who become a huge support to her. So each of those guides who show up in different chapters of the book help her have some sort of transformation, some sort of epiphany, some sort of just hope and light that they bring to the story that help you, as a reader, make sense of how she gets from one step to another. The other thing that I think really works about the manuscript is that the entire thing reads in Brittany's voice, which is really challenging to do. Even if you don't have a ghostwriter, it can be challenging to get your voice to translate from your speaking voice to the page. I have worked laboriously at length with authors over the years who are really gifted speakers but have a hard time getting their voice to show up on the page. It's a challenge, and it's even more challenging when you have a ghostwriter, because you have to find such symbiosis between the ghostwriter and the author that the ghostwriter is able to capture your voice, and even when they're writing sections for you, they're getting that voice to show up on the page. It is not easy. It takes a lot of time, just hours logged with ghostwriter and author together in the same room, so that you can almost take on the identity of the person that you're writing for and just translate the way that they would say something to the page. I know from experience how difficult this can be, and I think her ghostwriter did an absolutely phenomenal job. I would be very curious to know what their process was like, and I probably will never get to know the answer to that question. But every author does this a little bit differently. So do you have the author write sections first and send it to the ghostwriter to edit? Does the ghostwriter write first and send it to the author to edit? Do you sit down and do it together. Does Brittany speak into an audio file and send it to the ghostwriter and the ghostwriter translates that to the written word. There are so many different ways to do this, and it's a different process for each author based on what works well for them. And just major kudos to the ghostwriter who did a phenomenal job with this great job. So those are three things that I think work really well for the manuscript. There are a handful of things I think don't work as well, and I'd like to go through those. Also. The first thing that I think didn't really work is there's a lack of what I would call a narrator voice inside of the manuscript. Narrator voice, to me is the voice of the transformed author that's telling the story. This can get confusing for people because you are if you're writing a personal narrative. You're both the hero of the story and you're also the narrator of the story, but it's almost like two separate parts of you. There's the hero who's trapped in the dark time, who can't see their way out, who doesn't know how to solve this problem, who has obstacles and villains in their way. And then there's the narrator of the story, who sees the story from a thirty thousand foot view, who understands the whole perspective, who doesn't feel trapped, who is absolutely free, who's able to help the hero navigate the story and also help the reader navigate the story. So that the reader doesn't get lost in the myopic sort of dark details that were relating to them. The reader needs to hear those dark details through the lens of the narrator who's saying, don't worry, this is not where the story ends. I'm taking you somewhere wonderful. And if that narrator of voice isn't there, I find the reader has much less patience for the darkness than they would otherwise. Like I mentioned a minute ago, the narrative arc is so strong inside of the book, and based on the narrative arc that's set by the author and by the ghostwriter, we're expecting this transformation to be from a little girl to a strong, confident woman who stands on her own two feet. But the question that I had reading the book is where is the voice of that woman throughout? In other words, in that last paragraph that I read from the very last page of the book, you hear Britney say I'm this strong confident woman now. But I didn't find that her confidence was clearly portrayed throughout each chapter of the book. And you might be thinking, well, of course it's not clearly betrayed because she hasn't transformed into that woman yet. But that's the narrator voice that I'm talking about. You want that narrator voice to be present slowly throughout the entire book, so that the reader can see the destination that we're going to reach. You never want the reader to feel like they see the hero better than the narrator sees the hero. You want the narrator to be the one who says, I didn't see that then, but I see it now. And even something as simple as that, even that phrasing, can help the reader to see that there is a narrator who's transformed, who's guiding this process, even though we haven't gotten there yet. There are a couple of points when her narrative voice comes through really clearly, and I think she actually makes a few really amazing points. One of my favorite points that she makes in the entire thing is on the first page of chapter thirty one, where she says the conservatorship was created supposedly because I was incapable of doing anything at all, feeding myself, spending my own money, being a mother, anything. So why was it that a few weeks later they had me shoot an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then sent me on a grueling world tour. That is a really amazing example of the clarity of narrator voice. I wanted more and more and more of that narrator voice throughout the manuscript, and I just didn't get as much of it as I wanted. Another amazing example of narrator voice is on page one twenty, where she's talking about being attacked or chased by these paparazzo and she turns to one of them on camera and says, this is why I need a gun. I said to the camera, which probably didn't go over that well, but I was at my wits end. The magazines seemed to love nothing more than a photo they could run with the headline Britney Spears got huge look she's not wearing makeup, as if those two things were some kind of sin, as if gaining weight was something unkind I'd done to them personally, a betrayal. At what point did I promise to stay seventeen for the rest of my life? And I just think that's such an amazing job of narrator voice. Notice how what she does there is she tells a story where she says, I told the paparazzi this is why I need a gun, and then she said to the reader it probably didn't go over that well. I shouldn't have said that is what she's saying. And then she also says as if gaining weight was some kind of sin, as if this was something unkind I'd done to them personally. That's her narrative voice. That's the strength of her as a woman and her confidence coming through. That's not the child voice speaking, that's her grown woman voice speaking. And yet I just wanted more of that throughout the manuscript. I didn't feel like there was enough to satisfy my craving for it. Another thing that she did in the manuscript she slash her ghostwriter that I didn't think worked very well, and I never think this works very well. Is I'm going to call it name calling or it's actually really assuming that you understand the intention of why other characters in your story did what they did. And I'm not saying this as a slam to Brittany at all or to her ghostwriter. I'm more talking about this as a technique with writing that will make your writing much more powerful. That it's, in my opinion, lazy writing to use something as simple as name calling. So there are a couple instances in the manuscript where she calls her sister a bitch or ungrateful or a witch. She calls her family terrible, she calls Justin Timberlake some names, and she even says, people don't understand why I have so much anger toward my parents, And she said, I think if they had been through what I've been through, they would understand. And of course they would understand. When you understand what she's been through, you do understand her anger. And yet I think name calling is a lazy way to write about what has happened to you. And whereas a celebrity might be able to get away with something like that, I think it's actually more difficult for the average person to get away with name calling. What ends up happening is you lose your credibility with your reader, you lose your relatability, you lose their support of you when you call someone else a name. And to be fair, I think Brittany has a heart of gold as she name calls even herself. In the manuscript, on page one sixty four, she says, I mean, I'll say it, I was bad, And in my opinion, a good ghost writer should have edited that part out, because when you are writing a first draft of a personal narrative, you will find yourself saying stuff like that. You'll find yourself saying, like, you know, he was such an ahole or whatever, or I was such a whatever. But there's always an evolution beyond calling someone a name or naming someone as something. That is a more powerful way to tell the story than just using that word. And I think that we could have stretched the manuscript even further if we had gone there and along those same lines. Anytime that you're writing about someone and you find yourself tempted to fill in the blank for why they did what they did, my advice would be to stop yourself, because you are not an omniscient narrator. You don't know why other people in your story did what they did. You only know why you did what you did, and you can talk about how you felt about it, you can talk about how you interpreted it, but you can't really say they did that because they hated me, or they did that because they wanted to make me suffer, because you don't know if they did it because they wanted to make you suffer. There's no way for you to possibly know that unless you have them saying to you that that's why they did it, and even then you can't fully understand someone else's motives for doing what they did. So, in my opinion, I'm not making a statement about whether it's morally wrong or right to name call. I'm simply saying that if you want to stretch your writing and make your writing stronger, avoid name calling, avoid assuming that you know why other people did what they did, and stretch yourself to speak from your own perspective and to say something richer than just calling someone a name. I thought several times I was reading her memoir that this must have been really healing for her to write it, and I'm really glad that she got to share her own story in her own words. I think a couple other things that really worked about the manuscript that are just really practical, were the short chapters. In my experience in publishing ten years ago, short chapters used to be really frowned upon, and I'm finding them more and more being used, and I find them to be really helpful for a reader's attention span because if you can blow through three or four chapters in a sitting, you know, each chapter's only a couple pages long, so it's really easy to get through a couple chapters, and you can feel like you're making a lot of progress through the manuscript as the reader, and it's really compelling and motivating to keep on reading. I also think, you know, just as someone who has followed loosely Britney's career throughout the last two decades, she answered all the questions I wanted her to answer. She filled in all the blanks that I wanted her to fill in. She told the story. Really honestly, she strikes me as a person who has an absolute heart of gold, who would never intentionally hurt anybody, who, you know, like any of us, has her faults and has her own blind spots, but who genuinely is a really loving person and wants to do right by the people that she loves. And I'm really glad that she had the opportunity to tell her story in her own words, because I have to imagine that it was really healing for her after everything she's been through, similar to Prince Harry, you know, Brittany. A lot of why Brittany has suffered has been because of the family that she was born into, and also just the public career that she's had, the public life that she's had, and feeling like she didn't really have control over her own life or her own narrative. And so I can only imagine how healing it must have been for her to be able to put this story down on paper in her own words, and that in and of itself, is a really beautiful thing to watch. I do think it's worth reading, especially if you're a Britney Spears fan. I don't think that the prose is going to blow your mind. It's not going to be the most you know, like poetic thing that you've ever read, but it is a really well shaped story, an interesting story for anyone who has followed her career, and I absolutely recommend reading it.