Nickelodeon child star Jamie Lynn Spears opens up in her first memoir touching upon all of the major moments in her life, her family and how she was able to overcome some of the hardest moments in her life.
I was a huge fan of “Zoey 101” when it was on the air and like every other young teenager during late 00s, was shocked to hear that she had gotten pregnant at such a young age, thinking that was the reason the show ended. I was also a huge Britney Spears fan as she was the first artist I was able to recognize and sing along to. In recent years, like many other, I was interested in the release of Britney from her conservatorship and was shocked at what Jamie Lynn’s involvement (or lack there of) was. When I heard this book was coming out, I wanted to approach it with an open mind as that is how I want to take an approach to media and critiquing it. So any opinions I have of this book and this review are coming from a place as a book reader and lover of celebrity memoirs and my personal bias was not a factor.
There is nothing new added to the celebrity memoir genre with this book. It is your typical recounting of major events in the life of the author. Where some celebrities like to bring in guests to write sections of the book or tell their life story through a series of poems or other creative medium, none of that was here. There are so many celebrity memoirs out in the world now for people to pick up, so authors need to learn that the same old same old is not going to fly anymore. Write a book of poetry about all of the majors events in your life you want to talk about or tell the story from the perspective of you as a child going through your childhood events and keep maturing the writing style as you grow up and mature through your life. Being a famous name is not going to be enough anymore especially when you add next to nothing for the genre.
The biggest issue I had with Spears as an author was that I felt like she wanted to tell so many different stories from so many different aspects of her life but was not given the breathing room in terms of page length to tell it all. In a short 240 pages, we learn so much about Spears and her career from being a child star, to being Brittney’s little sister and everything Britney went through, to the events that led up to her being a teen mom and eventually finding her future husband with a little bit of recent Britney events sprinkled in for good measure. This is a lot to go through and the page length did not do it justice. Reading this book felt like getting whiplash with how quickly Spears covered the major events in her life. There is a lot she went through, I am not going to deny that fact, but there was not a central point that brought all of her stories together besides her. Yes, it is a memoir a lot of the focus should be on yourself, but I have read so many others that focus on a specific person other than the author or focus on a bunch of people that is the reason they are were they are today but this one felt like it was very selfishly written. It seemed as though Spears wanted to capitalize off of the media attention Britney was getting from fighting for her right to leave the conservatorship that this memoir was an easy cash grab. Now she may have wanted to release a memoir for a long time and I understand that, but the whole book felt very selfish and it turned me off from a lot of the stories I was genuinely interested in.
With nothing new added to the genre while feeling very money-hungry, “Things I Should Have Said” did not really say much of anything. While the little bits of her life we did get were interesting, the book’s page length deters it from being an adventure for the reader to join alongside the author in question.