The audiobook ofBritney Spears’memoir “The Woman in Me,” narrated by five-time Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, feels like the millennial cultural event my generation didn’t know we needed.

Williams is terrific reading the words of Spears and ghostwriter Sam Lansky. And as anyone who’s followed the 13 years of the pop star’s conservatorship and resulting #FreeBritney movement knows, the material is juicy.

如果你告诉我们20年前,坏女孩珍from high school drama “Dawson’s Creek” would be narrating the story of the reigning princess of pop, I don’t know what we would have thought. While they both rode the same wave of “retro-Lolita” cultural obsession in their late-1990s breakout performances (Williams as Jen, Spears in her school girl uniform in the “… Baby One More Time” music video), the two were treated differently.

Williams was allowed to develop as an adult performer and shed the teen baggage, but Spears seemed forever suspended, or, to quote one of her songs, “Not a girl, not yet a woman” in how she was portrayed. The culture seemed to regress in how Spears was chronicled: For much of the early 2000s, she was often described like a misbehaving child, or to highlight another misogynist trope of the era: a girl gone wild. The fact that we’ve known both Williams and Spears since their teen years makes this pairing richer in some way.

“The Woman in Me” is a reclamation project for Spears: a reclaiming of herself, her adult womanhood, and her story. The narrative voice feels conversational — Louisiana-twangy by way of Malibu. Williams delivers Spears’ unique intonation subtly, suggesting Spears’ inflections rather than doing an impersonation. There’s also a touch of Marilyn Monroe both in the arc of celebrity exploitation Spears endured, and in some of Williams’ performance. Williams portrayed her in the 2011 film “My Week With Marilyn,” another effective bit of pop culture layering.

Spears’ story is in many ways closer to another old Hollywood icon, Judy Garland. Like Garland, Spears worked since childhood and became the financial support for her dysfunctional family. The Spears clan reads like characters from lesser Tennessee Williams plays: alcoholics, failed athletes and deposed debutantes skulking around the swampy parts of Louisana, where she spent her early childhood.

At age 16, after a stint on “The New Mickey Mouse Club” (alongside then-unknowns Ryan Gosling, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake), she shoots to fame with the release of “… Baby One More Time.” But Spears’ popularity was always complicated, with parent groups complaining about what they perceived as overt sexuality in songs and videos like “Oops, I Did It Again” and “I’m a Slave for You.” Spears, now 41, still doesn’t understand the backlash, especially when compared with equally brazen male performers. She reminds readers that she never “signed up to babysit your kids.”

While racking up hit albums and pop music awards, she comes back into contact with Timberlake, then a part of boy band ’N Sync. Timberlake is one of three men who make up a deceitful patriarchal trinity in her life, along with her father, Jamie Spears, and ex-husband Kevin Federline. While deep in love with Timberlake, her first real relationship, she finds herself pregnant. Spears aborts the pregnancy with medication at home, too afraid to do it at a doctor’s office for fear of discovery. Not long after, Timberlake breaks up with her via text message then puts out the narrative that Britney was unfaithful to him as a center motif in his debut solo album, “Justified.” The circumstances were quite the opposite, Spears writes: Timberlake was the one who cheated on her.

Former backup dancer Federline is the next man to betray her when, after back-to-back pregnancies with sons Sean Preston and Jayden James, he leaves her to pursue an ill-fated career as a rapper and uses the children as pawns in divorce negotiations. The paparazzi run-ins, head-shaving incident and nights out with Paris Hilton are all covered in the book, leading into her father’s villain storyline as the architect of her conservatorship.

The control Jamie Spears exerts over her life and career is extreme. She mentions more than once that her father even knew when she went to the bathroom. Rehabs and in-patient mental programs are used as punishment when she begins to protest the long tour schedules and Las Vegas residencies: It’s at one of these clinics when she learns about the fan-driven #FreeBritney campaign that eventually leads her to press for her freedom from the conservatorship, which was granted in November 2021.

If this sounds melodramatic, it is. But since when was life, especially the lives of international celebrities, subtle? The story is filled with color and details that give Williams great material to perform. Many times Spears writes about feeling infantilized at the height of her fame “like Benjamin Button,” emotionally aging backward. There are deeply felt passages about what motherhood has meant to her, and she’s also genuinely funny, in a sly, very Southern way. She has a gift for “sass talking,” as she writes.

The text is wrapped in a bow by Williams’ performance. After a brief introduction read by Spears herself, Williams sells us the story in a way that lets us drop whatever we thought we knew about the pop star.

Reach Tony Bravo: tbravo@sfchronicle.com