Britney Spears on her breakdown & why her marriage ended

It seems like every couple of days new details from the upcoming Britney Spears documentary are leaked online. You get that her people are trying to build up buzz for the MTV event and for her new CD, and it’s working. It does seem to be too much information about her though, and given her struggles that we’ve witnessed through the media I feel kind of uncomfortable to hear her talk about them. It seems as if the strategy is for her to bare some of her pain in a sanitized way in order for people to better relate to her and take her seriously as a pop singer again. She’s a brand and she has an image to rebuild.

In the latest quotes to be released from “On The Record,” an upcoming 90 minute documentary, (I was incorrect in earlier stories when I said it was an hour) Britney pretty much hovers over most of the bases of her troubled life. She talks about her breakups with Justin Timberlake, husband Kevin Federline, and her struggle for freedom and a sense of identity after her children were born in close succession.

On her breakup with Justin Timberlake
“With Justin, he was a part of the magnitude of what I’d become,” says Spears, who ended a three-year relationship with Timberlake in 2002. “So then when he was gone, I was like, `What am I supposed to do with myself?’ … I would go out just to keep my mind busy, just to keep going.”

On struggling to find her identity after getting married and having kids
“With Kevin, because I had two children with him, I did not know what to do with myself,” she says. “I had built my dream home in Malibu, a huge house and a pool and a huge yard for the kids and I did everything for them. And just my world was that.”

She says she married Federline for the wrong reasons instead of following her heart. As a result, she went down a “weird path.”

On why her marriage ended
She says her marriage disintegrated when Federline began concentrating on his rap career.

When it ended, “I felt so alone. I didn’t really want to think about the reality of it. It was like, `I’m OK.’ … But I never really faced it, and I just ran,” she says.

On trying to make sense of her life after her divorce
“I’ve been through a lot this year _ well, actually the past two or three years,” she says. “And my trust has really been battered. I’ve definitely grown up _ big time. And I’m very weary of a lot of things. Very protective of myself.”

She says sometimes she gets lonely.

“You’re guarded,” she says. “You have to be that way, otherwise you get taken advantage of and get in situations like I did the past year. I totally lost my way. I lost focus, I lost myself, I had that type of nature within me that wanted to rebel out.

“I never wanted to become one of those prisoner people _ I always wanted to feel free and get in my car and go and not let people make me feel like I have to stay in my home. I think that was always the part of me that kinda got me in trouble,” she says.

[From AP via Huffington Post]

Britney’s team is trying to revamp her image with a new website and with this documentary, which sounds like it glosses over everything while explaining it in Britney’s kind of simplified way. It still seems to me like it’s too soon for her to be talking about it to the public – if she should ever talk about. Why not just move on and show that she’s capable of working again?

Just hearing her bring up the subject reminds me how troubled she really was. She had at least four separate crotch-baring incidents, including some ass-baring that happened earlier this year, she shaved her head and pulled the shades up in the salon so the paparazzi could capture it, and she went around driving aimlessly, wearing wigs and speaking in an accent. It’s very heartening to see her get better and restart her career if that’s what she wants, but I can’t help but feel like she’s being propped up to make a lot of people money and that’s why she has to talk about it. She was experiencing a full scale breakdown and we all watched it. That should have been private and so should the way she makes sense of it all after it’s old news.

Photo credit: Britneyspears.com