Britney Spears has been through a lot, from her 13-year conservatorship to her strained relationships with estranged family members. But one of the most difficult times in her life was her breakup with Justin Timberlake, as revealed in her new memoir The Woman In Me.
The pop star and *NSYNC band member dated from 1999 to 2002, until Timberlake allegedly broke things off with Spears via text message. The time immediately after was dark for the “Toxic” singer, who writes in her memoir she “barely left the house” following the couple’s split.
“When Justin began making his first solo album, Justified, he started being very standoffish with me,” Spears recalled in her autobiographical book, released Tuesday (Oct. 24). “I think that was because he decided to use me as ammunition for his record, and so it made it awkward for him to be around me, staring at him with all that affection and devotion.”
“Ultimately, he ended our relationship by text message while I was on the set for the video for the ‘Overprotected’ remix by Darkchild,” she continued. “After seeing the message as I sat in my trailer between takes, I had to go back out and dance.”
Spears added that the breakup left her “devastated.” “When I say, devastated, I mean, I could barely speak for months,” she wrote. “Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I can do is cry. I don’t know if I was clinically in shock, but it felt that way.”
In her long-awaited memoir, the “Sometimes” artist dropped quite a few bombshells about her high-profile romance with her former Mickey Mouse Club castmate, beyond the depression she faced following their split. While they were together, for instance, she said she got an abortion because Timberlake wasn’t ready for fatherhood; she also admitted to having cheated on her then-boyfriend once with choreographer Wade Robson after finding out about the “Cry Me a River” singer’s alleged affairs with other women.
Those struggles didn’t stop Spears from loving Timberlake, though — even after they called it quits. While she was still grieving the relationship, Timberlake brought her a framed handwritten letter that she still keeps under her bed, the Princess of Pop shares in her book. “And at the end it said — it makes me want to cry to think about it — ‘I can’t breathe without you.’ Those are the last words in it,” she writes.
“It almost felt like I was suffocating,” she adds, “like I couldn’t breathe after all that happened. The thing is, though, even after I saw him and read the letter, I didn’t come out of the trance. He did all that, he came there to see me and I still couldn’t talk — to him or to anybody.”