We Read Kevin Federline’s New Memoir So You Don’t Have To
Also: Watch Out, I’m The Lady Boss!
Kevin Federline, ex-husband of Britney Spears and creator of “PopoZão,” recently released You Thought You Knew, a slim 176-page memoir seemingly primarily designed to attempt two things: (a) establish that he is a good parent, and (b) rebut Britney’s version of their relationship as outlined in The Woman in Me, a considerably better-written book if not automatically the more honest one. If you may recall, beyond Britney accusing him of manipulating their custody hearings and making fun of his rap career, K Fed does not actually take up a lot of space in The Woman in Me, which is largely concerned with airing out Britney’s complaints about her father and her conservatorship — and, to a slightly lesser extent, elucidating the myriad ways Justin Timberlake sucks.
But Britney is the primary focus of You Thought You Knew, even though Federline and ghostwriter Alex Holstein pad out the story with half-baked anecdotes about K Fed’s rough-and-tumble adolescence in Fresno and that time he did cocaine with Snoop after the Super Bowl. This makes sense; Federline obviously read The Woman in Me and saw the immense amount of sympathy (and money) it garnered for Britney and wanted to scream. He has, as he points out several times in the book, pretty much publicly kept his mouth shut about her over the years when so many other people, including her own mother and sibling, didn’t — but the timer on that clock has clearly run out for him, perhaps not coincidentally right as their youngest son has become a legal adult.
To be clear, You Thought You Knew is not a great celebrity memoir.1 It reads like the work of a diligent student in your freshman comp class whose natural strengths do not lie in writing; you’d give his effort a B+, but you wouldn’t encourage this person to explore this as an innate creative gift. From a literary perspective, both The Woman in Me and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died blow it out of the water, and if you want to read a memoir from a person who had a brief assignation with a very famous person whose life has gone off the rails, Julia Fox’s excellent Down the Drain is right there. But — to quote the Los Angeles Times movie rating system from 1990 — although flawed, You Thought You Knew has moments. Here are the eight takeaways:
You Thought You Knew would have hugely benefited from having more time to bake, and the guiding hand of seasoned publishing professionals, rather than being rushed by a random imprint best known for audiobooks. The structure is mostly linear, but the times it isn’t make no narrative sense; Federline has a habit of dropping interesting tidbits and then coming back to them well after the reader has forgotten he mentioned them. There are several moments where he brings something up and then notes in a parenthetical that he will “get to that later,” something you can really only do once in a book, especially one that’s under 200 pages. He loves a cliché, and is extremely committed to a sentence fragment. If this project had landed on my desk, I would have suggested a complete restructuring and done extensive edits to flesh out the non-Britney bits. I suspect there was not time for any of that in this instance, but it’s a shame no one decided to take this project under their wing to actually make it a serious endeavor. This could have been a good book if someone had actually committed to making it one.
Kevin Federline, from the bits and pieces we get about his non-Britney years, has actually had a pretty interesting life. I would like to have read more about his upbringing in Fresno. The mid-book chapter where he writes about falling in with some drug dealers and being held at gunpoint twice in their presence was interesting and could have been extremely compelling with some focus. (Again, I note that Julia Fox would have made the appropriate meal out of this.) Federline’s mother, for a time, helped him become a successful pot dealer because she was growing and selling marijuana in another state; let’s talk more about that. And, as was the case with Britney and The Woman in Me, Federline’s years coming up in the entertainment industry during the aughts seem like they were ripe with interesting stories that he chooses to zoom through in order to get to what he clearly thinks is the meat of his argument. For example, there is one diverting tidbit about the time K Fed worked with Michael Jackson as a dancer in the “You Rock My World” video. For all our making fun of him back in the day, Federline was quite successful as a back-up dancer, going on huge tours with stars like Pink and working in legit, high-profile music videos. Alas, Federline does not actually want this book to be the story of his entire life because he’s here to settle a specific score, so the short bits where he talks about building up his career as a dancer are far too surface-level considering how interesting that probably actually was. Someone needs to write a tell-all about being famous in 2006 and really get into the nitty-gritty. What is Mandy Moore up to right now?2
Britney called Justin Timberlake the night before she married Federline, and told Kevin it was because she just “wanted closure.” But K Fed comes out