Cognitive Distance in Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears

Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly! by Jeff Weiss. MCD, 2025. 400 pages.

My favorite Britney Spears music video is “Sometimes.” Dressed in an all-white turtleneck and cargo pants on a picturesque boardwalk, Britney dances through somewhat stilted choreography to deliver doll-like advertisements — “Sometimes I run, sometimes I cry.” Bells twinkle in the background as she sings of her devotion. “All I really want is to hold you tight!” Her dancers form a heart, Britney in the middle. She blesses the viewer with forlorn, pleading eyes. She’s the picture-perfect image of American innocence — a girl on the television, yearning just for you! (The song also rocks).

That wide-eyed girl is the same one shattered to pieces in Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears, his gonzo memoir/novel/fanfiction about the rise and plummet of Britney in the early aughts. Its grip on reality is mostly-there but undoubtedly accessorized — Bob Saget berates him, Carmen Electra cuts in line, he schemes Tara Reid to get into the Playboy mansion. Conversations are reproduced in full detail, ditto for high-speed chases like when he gets arrested for trespassing on Brad Pitt’s mansion. Whatever he wrote at Nova, the tabloid where he reported on Britney, would be “massaged, exaggerated, rewritten with insinuations and innuendos,” though he promises they aimed lightly for truth. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume Weiss parallels his former employer’s strategy. He described the book as a “one-person referendum on the impossibility of knowing the exact truth about anything — especially anything refracted and distorted through the lens of electronic media.” That covers a lot of ground.

He starts with, presumably, the truth — a fresh-faced college student who crashed the video shoot for “...Baby One More Time” and immediately fell in love. Everyone on set knows the song will blow up, and a while after it does, he lands a gig at Nova after surfing Craigslist for writing jobs. Soon he’s zipping around Los Angeles for the paper, “Us [Weekly]’s kid sister with a tongue ring,” following Britney at parties and muscling his way into VIP lines. His bank account is attached to her shenanigans.

It’s a far cry from what he hoped to accomplish in his writing career — a serious novel, first of all, though he’d settle for Entertainment Weekly — but a job is a job. “Do something that’ll pay your bills,” a former editor says. “You’ll never go broke betting on Britney.” He takes it to heart, and he quits briefly after a Newsweek hit piece, but then here comes People, offering him a position. He just moved into a beautiful studio apartment in Hollywood, and rent ain’t cheap — the $3,000 bonus he got from breaking the story of Britney and Jason Alexander’s wedding surely helps. That issue sold over a million copies and shifted the paper from tabloid to glossy; this might be a career.

By his account, Weiss is everywhere. He’s there to see her “canoodling” with “mystery men” at all of LA’s hottest clubs, her second wedding, this time with Kevin Federline (his photographer, the weaselly Oliver, lies his way out of a speeding ticket to make it on time), the infamous “Bimbo Summit,” an exclusive shoot with a basically unconscious Britney, her Starbucks run with Sean Preston on her lap, the 2007 VMAs disaster where he heard her screaming “fat pig” about herself, and finally, the moment she breaks down, gives the paparazzi what they want and smashes a car window after shaving her head. “The sins of the recent and distant past have finally caught up to us,” he realizes after the razor clicks off. “We are through the looking glass, wading into a lightless marsh where everything forward exists in living death.”

At a certain point, the narrative turns slightly sour as his good-guy image can’t keep up with the relentless chase and profit of Britney. Sure, he’s not overly demanding, but he’s in the crowd nonetheless. “Shouldn’t we do something?” he asks Oliver when she’s terrorized at Starbucks, a flimsy move that results in no action. “You probably think that we’re just trying to exploit her, but I promise you, if we disappear, the real vultures will get to her,” one pap tells him. Waiting for Britney Spears’ benign cognitive dissonance is a beautiful undercurrent to the toxic 2000s power cycle.

Weiss isn’t totally ignorant in the role he plays, but his guilt feels like a product of time, not necessarily of self-reflection in the moment. “As you’re probably wondering, I realized that I was exploiting her,” he writes on page 287. “I regretted it and still do. But this was the system we were born into, and at some point, my own story became intertwined with hers, and theirs.” This sort of seems like he was held at gunpoint to follow her, but the demands of capitalism stop for no one. When the book turns into a quasi-apology for his past reporting, it gains an interesting and fractured layer, even if statements like “telling the whole truth was impossible, but there was the possibility of being sincere” have a vaguely “listening and learning” male feminist quality to them.

Reasonably, Weiss is hesitant to implicate himself in the debacle as an eroder of Britney’s sanity, rather a curious if empathetic bystander. More artists than ever before are setting boundaries in the demanding entertainment industry, and considering Spears’ own mental health breakdown and public comeback after the dissolution of her conservatorship, Waiting for Britney Spears is sort of a risk, no matter how apologetic. A pushier book could have been received less charitably, even as you get a sense that Weiss doesn’t hold back.

But aren’t you paying for the up close and personal look? Any outsider can analyze the Britney coverage during that time, but Weiss’ angle is how enveloped he was within the scene — the car chases and glimpses of Britney are the most thrilling moments, turning readers into tabloid scroungers all the same (cleverly, referring to her only as ‘Britney’ and not the journalistic ‘Spears’ reinforces the intimacy the public felt towards her, or any star). And once, this familiarity is realized when she slyly comes up to him at a club, where he stumbles over his words and apologizes for the “lies in the tabloids.” She calls him sweet before Paris Hilton leads her to Sunset Boulevard.

Did this really happen? Or is this a mirage in a desert of dishonesty, a picture-perfect Britney telling a timid Weiss exactly what he wants to hear? It’s too late; by reading, you’re signing off on the "allegedly" in the title like a terms or conditions. This is entertainment, pure and simple, which, in effect, forces the reader onto the same level as a shopper in 2003 slipping a disgraced Britney on the cover of Daily Mail next to their SlimFasts. We are, to be clear, profiting off of Britney’s story. He got money to write about her, then and now, and we’re paying attention to her, then and now. (I’m even profiting off him writing about her). As much as the industry has gotten (slightly) better at protecting its female stars, sometimes the cycle seems to have made no progress at all. Even following her on Instagram seems somewhat predatory.

Which is not to say Weiss shouldn’t have written the book — it often reaches the sincerity he aimed for, his last resort in contributing positively to Britney’s media coverage. Better yet, it’s a fantastic, juicy piece of writing. But his desires run even more naive; he respects and understands Britney, but even better — he loves her a lot. What guy wouldn’t jump at the chance to possibly talk with her, despite her (at the time) girly pop music? It brought to mind a time when I underrated my cousin’s affinity with the contemporary pop landscape — “I’m a twentysomething straight guy,” he told me, “of course I know who Tate McRae is.”

Come for the car chases, sure, but Weiss is as spectacular a music journalist as you can get. There’s the “cluster bomb filled with candy” of “...Baby One More Time”; “I’m a Slave 4 U” was like “something Prince would’ve bestowed to one of his muses: nasty, no-safe-word space-funk… Winter formal anthems swapped out for bondage and masturbation fantasies made for a club that didn’t look twice at fake IDs.” There’s some deserved ire for Justin Timberlake, too, a “schmaltzy song-and-dance man with a talent for mimicry, but lacking originality, imagination, and the capacity to surprise.” A hit from the Black Eyed Peas sounds like a “commercial for a geriatric Caribbean cruise line.”

But his best writing is about Blackout, Britney’s 2007 hip-hop and funk-infused middle finger to celebrity culture. Armed with “Gimme More” and “Piece of Me,” it takes her fabricated sleazy image and flips it around against those who had a hand in her own destruction. “Miss American dream” finally hits back. The album, he writes, “taps into what’s next: the space-shattering dubstep rumbling in the London underground, the chromatic rush of Berlin techno, MDMA-fried electro-crashed. At times, it sounds like Kraftwerk at a candy rave. At others, it sounds like Giorgio Moroder scoring an Ibiza Girls Gone Wild. There is a push and pull between automaton perfection and messy human soul that recalls OK Computer if the computer's homepage was Pornhub.”

“Blackout glows with a glossy hypermodernity that sounds like the digital age becoming a disruptive reality. This isn't the 3D glasses and shiny space suits of utopian dreams, but the bleak chill of a postindustrialized algorithmic mind virus. Lost futures only imagined as a collection of pixels. You can practically see her face projected on a million screens, small and large, prefiguring a millennium where, whether you know it or not, you are always consenting to be filmed.”

Such understanding of a work clearly about the tabloids underscores his own integration within them, a real “Wait, is this fucking play about us?” moment, but Britney has always been for everyone and anyone — bloodsuckers included. “The world Britney was raised in encouraged the fantasies, but the one she inherited was cold and confusing, filled with love and contempt to frightening extremes,” he writes, astutely. “Something, somewhere, had gone lethally askew, and she was chosen to be both weather system and weather vane.”

Waiting for Britney Spears raises questions of storytelling, journalistic ethos, and even narrowly puts its author at the center of what could have been a hurricane that strips him of his writerly integrity. Some will surely come out of this book hating Weiss for his involvement in Britney’s decline, but it’s much, much easier to treat the book as a glossy escape, a sugary balm that grips you just as Britney's own music continues to do. Sometimes I run, sometimes I cry, sometimes I plunge a star into a deceitful reality, sometimes I write a terrific book about it. We’re allowed to contradict ourselves.

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Sam Franzini is a writer in Washington, DC. He is an editor at The Line of Best Fit and a staff writer at OurCulture Mag and Northern Transmissions. His journalism has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, and NYLON.