Britney Spears shared a story about when she was in a terrifying car accident with her mom, Lynne Spears, and sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, when she was just 13 in her new memoir The Woman In Me. The popstar revealed that she was 13 and driving, but her mother asked if she’d been smoking. Britney claimed that Lynne grabbed her hand, and she lost control of the car, and she thought that they’d all perish in the accident.
Britney said her mom pulled her hand to her “fast” to smell it to check if she’d been smoking, and in that moment, she was shocked and couldn’t get a handle on the car. “I lost control of the wheel, and the car spun off the road. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. I looked back and saw little Jamie Lynn pressed backward into the seat: she had on a seat belt but wasn’t in a car seat. As we spun what felt like very slowly,” she wrote. “I kept thinking, We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die.”
Luckily, no one ended up hurt. Britney revealed that the rear of the car hit a telephone pole. She wrote that it was a “miracle,” that it hit that way. “If we’d hit the pole going forward, we would’ve gone through the windshield,” she wrote. “No one was hurt, fortunately. All three of us walked away.”
She also revealed that immediately after hitting the pole, her mom began yelling. “My mother jumped out of the car and just started yelling — at me for crashing, at cars passing by for help, at the world for letting this happen,” she recalled.
Britney’s memoir touches on many details from her childhood that hadn’t been shared. She discusses much about her upbringing and family, including her feelings about the controversial conservatorship. Ahead of the book’s release, Britney released a statement saying she didn’t intend to “offend” anyone. “Most of the book is from 20 years ago …. I have moved on and it’s a beautiful clean slate from here !!!! I am here to establish it that way for the rest of my entire life,” she wrote.