WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff Weiss
In 2023, the pop princess Britney Spears published her autobiography, “The Woman in Me.” In its pages, Spears had choice words for the paparazzi who pursued her at the heights and depths of her fame. She described them as enemy combatants, the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, sharks who sensed blood in the water. They were, she wrote, “an army of zombies” who treated her with “disregard” and “disgust.”
She hated them. She feared them. Jeff Weiss, by his own account, was one of them.
In the 2000s, Weiss worked as an occasional reporter for a couple of tabloids. (He was also cited for trespassing on Brad Pitt’s property, ostensibly at the bidding of People magazine.) He details these exploits — with grandiosity and rue — in “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly.” It is not a novel, not yet a memoir. A roman à clef? Probably. Autofiction? Sure. It is also, in its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens.
Weiss, if you believe him, first met Spears when he sneaked into the “ … Baby One More Time” video shoot, which was held at his Venice, Calif., high school. The first glimpse of a pigtailed Spears ensorcelled him. A few years later, sprung from college and lightly adrift, Weiss found himself flung into her orbit again. Zhuzhing his résumé and shushing his qualms, Weiss persuaded a tabloid to hire him as a Hollywood party and celebrity reporter. (Context clues suggest that the tabloid was Star; in the book, Weiss calls it Nova.)
This is a book that wears its antecedents on its sleeve, or perhaps low on the brow, like a Von Dutch hat. There’s new journalism here and gonzo journalism, as well as more literary stabs at the mournfulness of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the contempt of Nathanael West. Parts of the book read like a retread of “Miss Lonelyhearts,” doused in apple martinis. Other sections suggest link-rotted LiveJournal entries. In broad strokes, it is a story of a young man’s disillusionment, a West Coast “Sweet Smell of Success,” if success smelled like Victoria’s Secret body mist.
These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes. A 22-year-old college grad distracted from working on his novel? Oh no! And there is a cloying quality to his repeated insistence that he is too pure, too talented to do the work of a tabloid reporter. Many of us who make a life in journalism have done as bad or worse, without ever expensing our drinks.
Happily, Weiss excels at evoking the darkness and frivolity of the 2000s world he slinks through. He is very good on music. He describes “ … Baby One More Time” as exploding “like a cluster bomb filled with candy.” And he is even better on drugs, as in when he details a night on MDMA: “Arteries flooded by Jacuzzi jets. Day-Glo color lighting up edges of my mind. I’m sweating diamonds.”
Reading the book can feel — this is a good thing — like mainlining the sugar at the bottom of a Sour Patch Kids box. Too snobbish to enjoy the parade of the decade’s B-list, C-list and D-list luminaries? Your loss. Weiss trails Tara Reid through a party at the Playboy Mansion. He flirts with Jennifer Coolidge. Hey, there’s Kato Kaelin!
If the narrator’s obsession with Spears verges on creepy (an occupational hazard when you are a young man tasked with stalking her), the book also offers a prismatic portrait of the pop star as hellion, sybarite, entertainer, lost girl and victim. There’s a bubblegum schadenfreude to these scenes, but also genuine interest and affection.
Late last month, just before the publication of Weiss’s book, a publisher announced that it was sunsetting its slate of tabloids, In Touch and Life & Style among them. This makes “Waiting for Britney Spears” a neon-highlighter portrait of an era when jeans were low and headlines wide and high, lending it an accidental poignancy.
In the middle of the book, after a high-speed pursuit of Casey Affleck, the Weiss character contemplates quitting. “If you don’t have a little clarity after nearly dying on a mistaken chase following the lesser-known brother of the star of ‘Gigli,’ all the bulbs are broken,” he writes.
Well, the flashbulbs are nearly all gone now, their light redistributed among the millions of cellphone cameras clutched by amateurs, people who document their lives and the lives of others like every day is the V.M.A.s. We’ve democratized celebrity. We’ve also democratized its coverage. Weiss was perhaps too good for it, but we’re all paparazzi now.
WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly | By Jeff Weiss | MCDxFSG | 400 pp. | Paperback, $19
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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