Waiting for Britney Spears

A True Story, Allegedly

De: Jeff Weiss

"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 told by an iconoclastic music journalist.

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.

©2025 Jeff Weiss (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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

"Waiting For Britney Spears is a singularly thrilling and inventive reading experience, acting as a vivid time capsule, a sometimes hilarious and sometimes devastating rush of landscapes and people and places within them, but always an incredibly immersive read, that transformed and transported me."―Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"I had no idea that one of America's premier hip-hop journalists began his career chasing pop sensations through the seedy VIP areas of the West. The tale Jeff Weiss weaves of his gossip-rag adventures, focusing on the elusive unicorn Britney Spears, reads like a J.D. Salinger novel rolled in Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogen dust. Unlike most previous gonzo culture chroniclers, Weiss has compassion for his subjects—he cares about Spears as a person even as he strives to understand her as an object of mass (and, for him, personal) desire. File this one next to The Day of the Locust on your True Tales of Hollywood shelf."—Ann Powers, NPR music correspondent and author of Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell