Waiting for Britney Spears - by Jeff Weiss (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A frenetic account of Britney Spears's historic rise and equally tragic fall, from Jeff Weiss, LA's Hunter S. Thompson.

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 is a young writer who for all practical purposes let's call Jeff Weiss, who took whatever job he could to pursue his dream of being a "serious" writer. He'd instead become a firsthand witness 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 making it as a celebrated cultural critic, Weiss presents Waiting for Britney Spears, a gonzo, nostalgic, and mostly true recounting of Britney's rise and fall during his years in the tabloid 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 years leading to Britney's conservatorship, he observes, with peerless style, cringe-inducing fashion waves, a destructive culture of 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 roaring Künstlerroman of celebrity, obsession, morality, and the last great pop star.

Review Quotes

"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

"Waiting for Britney is the very definition of "smart escapism" 400-plus vertiginous and Cheeto-dusted pages of neon Los Angeles and vintage Bonnie Fuller-era tabloid sensationalism that reads like a juicy longform magazine story that you never want to end. The writing practically bounces with a Neptunes beat. I loved it." --Cat Marnell, author of How to Murder Your Life

"A gonzo ride through the twisted kingdom of millennial Hollywood. Young and hungry Jeff Weiss chooses his own adventure, sallying forth in his quest to outsmart greedy monsters, placate sleazy managers and rub shoulders with b-boy paupers, all while in search of the Pop Princess herself. A witty, whip-smart book I couldn't stop reading." ―Kate Flannery, author of Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles

About the Author