More Big Reveals From Britney Spears' Memoir

Britney Spears' memoir, The Woman in Me, was released Tuesday, and some of the buzzier nuggets had already been circulating in advance—including the revelation that the singer had an abortion years ago when she was dating Justin Timberlake. More details are now out on that latter disclosure, per People, in which the now-41-year-old Spears says only she, Timberlake, and her assistant at the time knew about the at-home medical abortion, with her assistant telling her, "It might hurt a little bit, but you'll be fine." Spears writes that the process took hours and was "excruciating," and that at one point, Timberlake "came into the bathroom and lay on the floor with me. At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me strumming it." A few other takeaways from Spears' book, per People, USA Today, and Insider:

• 'Eternal virgin': That's how her managers and press team tried to frame a young Spears to her fans, she says. "Never mind that Justin [Timberlake] and I had been living together, and I'd been having sex since I was 14," she writes, adding, "Why did my managers work so hard to claim I was some kind of young-girl virgin even into my 20s? Whose business was it if I'd had sex or not?"
• Friendship with Madonna: Spears reveals that after her 2002 breakup with Timberlake, she holed up in an apartment formerly owned by Cher, letting few visitors in. One of those was Madonna, who Spears says helped her through that rough time. "She told me I should be sure to take time out for my soul, and I tried to do that," Spears writes of the Material Girl. "She modeled a type of strength that I needed to see."
• Marriage to Federline: Spears writes that her connection with her second husband was immediate, and that they shared a comforting intimacy in their early days together. But she notes she saw a "slow motion" change in her spouse once money and fame affected him: "When I found him [in Vegas], he had his head shaved. He was getting ready to shoot the cover for his album. He was in the studio all the time. He really thought he was a rapper now. Bless his heart—because he did take it so seriously."
• Snake show: Spears recalls her 2001 MTV Video Music Awards performance, in which she seemed quite confident performing with a 7-foot albino Burmese python wrapped around her neck. It wasn't as easy as it looked, she now says. "What nobody knows is that as I was singing, the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing at me," she writes. "You didn't see that shot on the TV, but in real life? I was thinking, 'Are you f---ing serious right now? The f--ing godd--- snake's tongue is flicking out at me. ... Finally, I got to the part where I handed it back, thank God."

More here. (More Britney Spears stories.)