Britney Spears opens up about her relatively tame party days in her upcoming memoir, with the pop star saying her “drug of choice” was the ADHD med Adderall, according to The New York Times (which obtained an advanced copy of the book).
In The Woman in Me (out Oct. 24), Spears said she was never interested in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Of her relationship with Adderall, she admitted the medication “made her high,” but added: “What I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”
During the mid-to-late 2000s, as Spears endured a constant onslaught of paparazzi and press attention, there was a lot of speculation about her drug and alcohol use. In one famous instance, she was papped while out with fellow tabloid favorites of the era, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, though Spears insisted in the book: “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be.”
Furthermore, Spears seemed to push back on speculation that she was inebriated during one of the most harrowing moments in her life: when she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. Spears said she was actually “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt, and while also stuck in a difficult custody fight with ex-husband Kevin Federline.
“With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” Spears wrote. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.” She continued: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”
Several other bits of The Woman in Me have leaked out prior to the book’s publication, including Spears’ depiction of her physically grueling and mentally frustrating life under her conservatorship. There have also been several revelations about her relationship with Justin Timberlake, including the bombshell that Spears, at 19, became pregnant with Timberlake’s child and ended up having an abortion.