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)

A gimlet-eyed excavation of Britney Spears' ascent to pop stardom and the insatiable celebrity machine that consumed her. In this fizzy romp through Spears' meteoric rise and painfully public downfall, music writer and cultural critic Weiss unveils the toxic celebrity ecosystem that both created and consumed pop's most compelling millennial icon. Through a narrative style reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's "Gonzo" journalism, Weiss launches his story at the production of Spears' career-defining "…Baby One More Time" video, in which he served as an extra. "Every celebrity crush became irrelevant," Weiss writes. "Britney was the opposite of everything I'd known. A sequined mirage and airbrushed myth. It felt like I'd just watched a comet be born." When Weiss lands a job at a Los Angeles--based celebrity tabloid in the early 2000s, he spends years tracking Spears' every move and spiraling breakdown, not just capturing the nation's (and his own) obsession with Spears but crafting an incisive portrait of the music industry's seedy underworld. Through his colorful lens as a reporter, we experience trendy clubs, wild parties, and frantic car chases through L.A. The tabloids themselves emerge as characters in this unfolding drama of American celebrity worship and exploitation. As Weiss observes of the "ravenous desire for celebrity gossip": "If the tabloids were once on the fringes of pop culture, they're now international big business. The lines between news, sports, and entertainment have been erased." While often mesmerizing and brutally honest in its depiction of fame's dark side, Spears' crash-and-burn story, stretched across 400 pages, occasionally feels excessive and repetitive. Yet Weiss proves himself a formidable talent with a keen eye for capturing the pulse of the moment, a writer whose future work will be well worth anticipating. A bold, inventive foray into the dark netherworld of pop star fame. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.