“I’m not that innocent,” belts Britney Spears in her 2000 hit song “Oops! … I Did It Again.” That certainly sounds like it was true as you read the first part of Spears’s hit new memoir, The Woman in Me. She writes of growing up too fast in the tiny town of Kentwood, Louisiana, witnessing her father’s alcohol-induced mood swings and dayslong absences from the family, waiting tables at the local seafood restaurant at age 9, drinking daiquiris with her mother at 13, and losing her virginity at 14. All the while, the soon-to-be star was flying back and forth to New York City for grueling theater performances and meetings with record execs.

“Even amid all the darkness, there was still a lot of joy in my childhood,” Spears writes. Indeed, her memoir teeters back and forth from the depths of despair to exhilaration. Reading it is a wild and gut-wrenching ride. By the time you get to Spears’s description of the emotional and physical agony she endured from having an abortion at 19, after she became pregnant with boyfriend Justin Timberlake’s baby, your heart will ache.