Waiting for Britney Spears

A True Story, Allegedly

De: Jeff Weiss

Narrado por: Jeff Weiss, Mel Bouzad, Sedona Soluoshon

"Like a J.D. Salinger novel rolled in Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogen dust."—Ann Powers, author of Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

"[Waiting for Britney Spears] transformed and transported me."―Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

A frenetic, gonzo account of Britney Spears’s historic rise and equally tragic fall written and read by iconoclastic music journalist Jeff Weiss.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He'd instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Years later, after finally establishing himself as a celebrated journalist, Jeff Weiss presents Waiting for Britney Spears, a gonzo, nostalgic, and “allegedly true” recounting of his years as a tabloid spy in the lurid underbelly of Los Angeles. Weiss follows America’s sweetheart through Vegas superclubs and Malibu car chases, annulled marriages and soul-crushing legal battles, all the way to Britney’s infamous 2007 VMA performance. As Weiss lives through the chaos leading to Britney’s conservatorship, he observes, with peerless style, cringe-inducing fashion waves, destructive celebrity surveillance, and a country whose decline is embodied by the devastating downturn of its former golden child.

With the narrative flair that established him as a singular chronicler of modern pop culture, Weiss goes for broke in Waiting for Britney Spears, a descent into a neon hall of mirrors reflecting our obsession with fame, morality, and the mystery of what really happened to the last great pop star.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD Books.

©2025 Jeff Weiss (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"An exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears’s career . . . In colorful, entertaining detail, Weiss lucidly explains how the paparazzi capitalized on the chaos of Spears’s life to give the public the chaos they demanded . . . As much a thrilling chronicle of Spears’s life as it is a perceptive examination of celebrity culture, this captivates."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A gimlet-eyed excavation of Britney Spears’ ascent to pop stardom and the insatiable celebrity machine that consumed her . . . Weiss proves himself a formidable talent with a keen eye for capturing the pulse of the moment, a writer whose future work will be well worth anticipating."―Kirkus Reviews

"Britney Spears’s rise to fame—and fall from grace—is indelibly imprinted in my brain via an increasingly hyperbolic series of tabloid headlines. Here, Weiss, a journalist who covered the pop star during her prime, peeks beneath those narratives to paint a sharply observed portrait of how the media used Spears to feed a public simultaneously hungering for a girlish innocent and an unhinged force of destruction, shedding fascinating light on American celebrity culture past and present."—Miriam Grossman, Publishers Weekly