I am working on a play about Marilyn Monroe at the moment and, reading Britney Spears’s book, the similarities of these two fragile blondes came to mind. Both were celebrated and castigated for their woman-child sex appeal; both struggled with sinister Svengalis – Darryl Zanuck and Mickey Mouse. But one big difference between the two is that Marilyn often wished she had a father, while one imagines Britney often wishes she hadn’t. In the long and sorry history of parasitical men leeching off talented women, was there ever a more worthless example than Jamie Spears? He used his daughter as a cash-cow from her childhood; when she became an adult and he saw his grip on her loosening, he had himself made her court-appointed conservator for 13 years, controlling her career, finances and even fertility. But now Britney is back in charge of her estimated $60 million estate and can make personal decisions for herself – including the writing of this book.

How could so much fear and loathing circulate around a pretty girl who just wanted to sing and dance?

And what a book it is – both payday (an estimated $15 million advance, justified by selling more than a million copies in its first week of publication) and payback. Britney has her dad bang to rights from the first page: ‘My mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home.’ She returns to the topic many times. I can see her and her well-chosen ghost-writer Sam Lansky  wrangling over the number of dad-disses per dozen pages. Unlike Prince Harry’s ghost,  J.R. Moehringer, who had Spare starting with a quote from William Faulkner (an unlikely choice of reading for the man who, despite an expensive education, only managed a B in art and a D in geography at A-level), Lansky wisely avoids having Britney quote copiously from Sylvia Plath.

Her sexualisation began long before she was posing on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing lingerie and cuddling a Teletubby under the headline: ‘Britney Spears: Inside the Heart, Mind and Bedroom of a Teen Dream’. Aged ten, as a contestant on the TV talent show Star Search, she was chatted up by the host, Ed McMahon: ‘You have the most adorable, pretty eyes… do you have a boyfriend? How about me?’ But objectification seemed a small price to pay for the success it brought so swiftly when, at 17, she became the first female singer to debut with a No.1 album and single at the same time: ‘I can feel my life start to open up.’

 Inevitably there are lashings of you-go-girl feminism: ‘I realised how powerful it can be when women defy expectations.’ But just when it was getting a bit ‘empowering’, the book’s great comic character shows up: Justin Timberlake, a fellow Mouse-keteer from Britney’s childhood, now rebooted as a teen idol and hellbent on being black. On running into the R&B star Ginuwine, he exclaims: ‘O yeah, fo shiz, fo shiz! What’s up, homie?’ Though it’s nice for Britney to have a boyfriend going through the same experience, she notes: ‘The questions he got asked by talk show hosts were different from the ones they asked me. Everyone kept making comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether I’d had plastic surgery.’

The misogyny directed at beautiful women in the public eye is a specifically spiteful kind, as men who have no chance of a relationship with their dream girl relish her dehumanisation and downfall. After Britney performed in skimpy clothing at the 2000 Video Music Awards, MTV sat her down in front of a monitor to watch strangers give their opinion on her performance:

The camera was trained on me, waiting to see if I would take it well or I would cry. Did I do something wrong, I wondered? I never said I was a role model. All I wanted to do was sing and dance…Yet another person was saying I wasn’t ‘authentic’ – what was I supposed to be doing, a Bob Dylan impression? I was a teenage girl. I signed my name with a heart. Why did everyone treat me like I was dangerous?

She sought comfort in theology and Prozac.

What must it feel like for a 20-year-old girl with a rudimentary education to be named the most powerful female celebrity by Forbes magazine? Not half as weird as being named the most powerful celebrity overall the following year, I’d imagine. It’s the sheer speed of Britney’s life that amazes, and the fact that she had to grow up with a good part of the world gawking at her. How could so much fear and loathing circulate around a pretty girl who just wanted to sing and dance?

Though she was living with Timberlake by now, he wasn’t much help, messing around with assorted All Saints. He pressured her to have an abortion. As she lay crying on the bathroom floor afterwards, ‘he thought music would help, so he got his guitar and lay there with me strumming it’.

Not long afterwards he dumped her by text message. She went home to her mother’s house for consolation, and even there People magazine came to interview her and she was so compliant that when reporters asked her to empty out her handbag to see if it contained drugs or cigarettes, she did. But Timberlake wasn’t finished with her: on his next album there’s a song called, confusingly, ‘Don’t Go (Horrible Woman)’, while the Cry Me a River video features a girl who looks like Britney.

Soon she was getting booed at clubs and sports stadiums for her alleged whorishness. Being publicly pilloried unhinged her: ‘I’ve always been disturbingly empathic. What people are feeling in Nebraska, I can feel thousands of miles away.’ Alone in New York, she cheered up when Madonna dropped in to instruct her in the ways of the Kabbalah, but it would take more than a red string bracelet and a Hebrew tattoo to put Britney together again.

What followed was the stuff of sad tabloid headlines: the drunken, annulled Vegas wedding, the second marriage to a man who already had two toddlers elsewhere, the hypersexual tour which she hated so much she prayed for a physical injury to end it. (She got her wish – and Vicodin.)

The birth of two children gave the paps Bad Mother Britney to torment, now that Sex Britney had been put to bed. Her husband, living off her money, fancied himself a celebrity, coming home from a party and boasting ‘Justin Timberlake was there!’ He soon showed his true talent, tearing financial chunks off his depressed wife during their subsequent divorce and taking her children away from her.

She then shaved her head, lost her six-pack, was tied to a gurney and hospitalised, and the conservatorship was enforced. In a truly surreal moment of horror, her father told her: ‘I’m Britney Spears now.’ She was still only 26. For 13 years she was reduced to the status of what she calls, without exaggeration, a ‘child-robot’, drugged and institutionalised whenever she  rebelled. Sometimes she compares herself to Benjamin Button, ageing backwards but in the worst possible way, moving from a confident girl to a baffled woman whose father tells her what she can eat and who she can have sex with.

For 13 years she was reduced to the status of a ‘child-robot’, drugged and institutionalised whenever she rebelled

She is now 41. I’d like it to end happily, but this is such a sad story, not least because no one seems to have learned anything. Britney married another man who lived off her money, a union which has now ended.  Timberlake made an insincere-sounding apology a couple of years back, but just last month his friend, the producer Timbaland, said of Britney at a public event: ‘She’s going crazy, right? I wanted to call and say “JT, man, you gotta put a muzzle on that girl.’’’ His subsequent apology (‘To the Britney fans, and her. You know about respecting women – hell yeah’) could not have been more contemptuous.

Still, Britney has the best revenge. Not only is this book the fastest-selling showbiz memoir of all time but the streaming of her music increased by a quarter in the first week of publication, while album sales rose by 60 per cent. It would be lovely if she could enjoy her money at last instead of having sharks circling her for it. I hope she doesn’t die young, like Marilyn. She’s worked so hard and has been treated so badly. She deserves her day in the sun, with her toes in the sand, feeling at least for one shimmering afternoon like she did before it all happened: hopeful.