Britney Spears drank daiquiris with her mother in Biloxi in 8th grade: âWe called our cocktails toddiesâ
There’s a Biloxi connection in singer Britney Spears’ new memoir being released next week.
Multiple national media outlets have focused so far on the revelation that Spears had an abortion at age 19 with singer Justin Timberlake as one of the main takeaways from the book, “The Woman in Me.”
But the Mississippi Coast is in there too.
According to the Daily Mail, Spears writes about traveling to Biloxi as an eighth grader to drink daiquiris with her mother, Lynne, after “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” ended in 1995. “For fun … my mom and I would make the two-hour drive from Kentwood to Biloxi, Mississippi, and while we were there, we would drink daiquiris,” Spears wrote. “We called our cocktails ‘toddies.’”
“I loved that I was able to drink with my mom every now and then,” The Hollywood Reporter said. “The way we drank was nothing like how my father did it. When he drank, he grew more depressed… We became happier, more alive and adventurous.”
Excerpts from the book were published this week by People Magazine.
Hailing from Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears rose to fame as a tween on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” alongside other future stars like Ryan Gosling and Timberlake — a trajectory chronicled in other excerpts published by People.
Despite some further attempts at acting — in the People excerpts, she says the lead in “The Notebook” came down to her and Rachel McAdams and that she was relieved when 2002′s “Crossroads” was “was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career” — she found indelible stardom with her music career, starting with 1999′s “…Baby One More Time.”
She had two sons with Kevin Federline, but was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship — mostly under the supervision of her father — that controlled her life, money and voice after public breakdowns. That conservatorship would last nearly 14 years, ending in late 2021, after a swelling #FreeBritney movement that helped secure new limits on conservatorships in California.
In the excerpt published in People, she characterized the abortion as “one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she writes of the procedure, according to the excerpt “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
The pregnancy “was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” she wrote, saying that she had wanted to start a family with Timberlake — it was just earlier than expected.
“But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young,” she wrote. The couple broke up in 2002. It’s unclear when the pregnancy happened.
Spears’ long-awaited memoir will be published Oct. 24, just months after her divorce from Sam Asghari was announced and promising to shed light on the 41-year-old’s tumultuous decades in the spotlight.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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