Britney Spears is opening up about a traumatic event that she has kept private for 20 years.
The 41-year-old pop icon discusses having an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, PEOPLE has confirmed.
“It was unexpected, but it wasn’t a disaster for me. I was smitten with Justin. I’ve always thought we’d start a family someday. This would just be a lot earlier than I’d planned,” Spears says in the book about the pregnancy. “However, Justin was undoubtedly unhappy about the pregnancy. He claimed that because we were still so young, we weren’t prepared to become parents.
The request for comment from PEOPLE was not immediately answered by a Timberlake representative.
In the book, she states: “If it had been up to me alone, I would never have done it. However, Justin was very certain that he didn’t want to have children.
As Spears describes her experience with the abortion, “To this day, it’s one of the most painful things I ever went through in my life.”
After Spears and Timberlake divorced in 2002, she gave birth to two kids with her second husband, Kevin Federline: Sean Preston, 18, and Jayden James, 17.
On October 24, Spears will publish her much-awaited memoir through Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
The memoir appears almost two years after Spears was freed from the 13-year-old conservatorship that had been imposed by order of the court. After Spears passionately testified in court in June 2021, the conservatorship was lifted in November 2021.
The singer’s memoir “illuminates the enduring power of music and affection — and the importance of a woman stating her own story, on her own terms,” according to a press release from Gallery Books. It promises to reveal “for the first time her amazing journey (and) strength at the core of one of the biggest performers in pop music history.”