From Bad Girl to Bad Mother

What Britney Spears's new memoir 'The Woman in Me' tells us about the challenges of feminine self-actualization— and the difficulty of attaining it through memoir

Britney Spears’s grandmother, Jean, shares a name with my great-grandmother, also a Jean. Living a generation apart, both women suffered at the hands of their husbands. As I write in Touched Out, my great-grandmother died from complications caused by a final at-home abortion, after living for years with an angry alcoholic husband who apparently threw gr…