Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly

(Paperback)

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America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-two-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles is a young writer-for all practical purposes we'll call him Jeff Weiss-who took whatever job he could to pursue his dream of being a "serious" writer. He would instead become a firsthand witness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by "the coy it-girl at the end of history." Years later, after finally making it as a celebrated cultural critic, Weiss presents Waiting for Britney Spears, a gonzo, nostalgic, and mostly true recounting of Britney's rise and fall during his years in the tabloid underbelly of Los Angeles. Weiss follows America's sweetheart through Vegas superclubs and Malibu car chases, all the way to her infamous 2007 VMA performance and conservatorship. As Weiss wrestles with his own complicity, he observes a destructive culture of celebrity surveillance and a country whose decline is embodied by the devastating downturn of its former golden child. With the narrative flair that established him as a singular chronicler of modern pop culture, Weiss goes for broke in Waiting for Britney Spears, a roaring Knstlerroman of celebrity, obsession, morality, and the last great pop star.

Reviews

"An exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears's career . . . 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 . . . As much a thrilling chronicle of Spears's life as it is a perceptive examination of celebrity culture, this captivates." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A gimlet-eyed excavation of Britney Spears' ascent to pop stardom and the insatiable celebrity machine that consumed her . . . 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." Kirkus Reviews

"Britney Spears's rise to fame--and fall from grace--is indelibly imprinted in my brain via an increasingly hyperbolic series of tabloid headlines. Here, Weiss, a journalist who covered the pop star during her prime, peeks beneath those narratives to paint a sharply observed portrait of how the media used Spears to feed a public simultaneously hungering for a girlish innocent and an unhinged force of destruction, shedding fascinating light on American celebrity culture past and present. --Miriam Grossman, Publishers Weekly

"Waiting For Britney Spears is a singularly thrilling and inventive reading experience, acting as a vivid time capsule, a sometimes hilarious and sometimes devastating rush of landscapes and people and places within them, but always an incredibly immersive read, that transformed and transported me." Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"I had no idea that one of America's premier hip-hop journalists began his career chasing pop sensations through the seedy VIP areas of the West. The tale Jeff Weiss weaves of his gossip-rag adventures, focusing on the elusive unicorn Britney Spears, reads like a J.D. Salinger novel rolled in Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogen dust. Unlike most previous gonzo culture chroniclers, Weiss has compassion for his subjects -- he cares about Spears as a person even as he strives to understand her as an object of mass (and, for him, personal) desire. File this one next to The Day of the Locust on your True Tales of Hollywood shelf." --Ann Powers, NPR music correspondent and author of Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

"Waiting for Britney is the very definition of "smart escapism" 400-plus vertiginous and Cheeto-dusted pages of neon Los Angeles and vintage Bonnie Fuller-era tabloid sensationalism that reads like a juicy longform magazine story that you never want to end. The writing practically bounces with a Neptunes beat. I loved it." --Cat Marnell, author of How to Murder Your Life

"Gonzo writer Jeff Weiss roams through the gaudy paradise of pop music pursuing the enigmatic Golden Star Britney Spears from Mouseketeer to Sex Goddess as she rises to the height of fame, crashes low, rises higher. In prose that seems to mime the frenetic rhythms of pop, Weiss guides us with sardonic humor through a cartoon Las Vegas wedding, a surreal orgy in Technicolor at the Playboy Mansion, sex, drugs, booze, scandals and more scandals. Out of that erotic chaos, Weiss discovers a poignant lament, a yearning for something more than what is found in the world of luxuriant excess. Within that orbit, Weiss defines, movingly and unforgettably, the stunning creation known to the world as Britney Spears." John Rechy, author of City of Night

"A gonzo ride through the twisted kingdom of millennial Hollywood. Young and hungry Jeff Weiss chooses his own adventure, sallying forth in his quest to outsmart greedy monsters, placate sleazy managers and rub shoulders with b-boy paupers, all while in search of the Pop Princess herself. A witty, whip-smart book I couldn't stop reading." Kate Flannery, author of Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles

Author Bio

Jeff Weiss was born and raised in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, GQ, and Pitchfork, and has been repeatedly anthologized in Da Capo Best Music Writing. He has profiled everyone from Kendrick Lamar to the Beat Generation poets, Andr 3000 to Paul Thomas Anderson. In 2023, Rolling Stone named him one of the "50 Innovators Shaping Rap's Next 50 Years." He is currently the editor-in-chief and founder of the culture website POW. Waiting for Britney Spears is his first book