The Follow: Jeff Weiss, Author
For the long-awaited latest edition of The Follow, Abe Beame links up with Jeff Weiss to talk about his new book Waiting for Britney Spears, out on June 10th.
Abe Beame is in search of some other hobbies he can build his personality around, and is open to suggestions.
The Follow is an interview series I plan on putting out occasionally, or frequently, or maybe never again, in which I basically just talk to the people I enjoy following online who are willing to talk to me for a while. It will be about what they come to Twitter for, how they cultivate their online personas, the things they feel passionate enough to contribute to the infinite discourse on this app, and why they feel the need to do it. And on a basic level, it will be two people on Zoom shooting the shit.
The first time I read Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears, it was January 2023, towards the “end” of COVID and on the cusp of another American nightmare. I remember it well, because it was the first time in 15 years writing would flow in the other direction, the tables were turned and I got to “edit” Jeff, or at least pass back some gut reactions and observations on the first draft of his first novel..
This is why despite having what I assume most editors would consider pretty unique access to the author of a book many publications have deemed one of the best reads of this summer (Author’s Note: It’s not non-fiction!), even as a schmuck freelancer who lives from idea to idea, I didn’t try to pitch any kind of formal review or interview with Jeff elsewhere. I felt it wouldn’t be ethical to even play at objectivity in discussing a work I read in its early stages two years ago, written by the person I’ve worked with in any capacity longer than anyone else on Earth. Instead, because of the book’s meta relationship to media and its inner workings, I suggested we bring back the silly interview series I’ve sporadically put together for this site.
Miraculously, Jeff was into it, and the result was an in depth, three-hour conversation about his book and celebrity and the state of fiction and the state of culture and the nature of fiction and the end of our country and our hopes and dreams, and will read far less professionally or restrained than this already deeply unprofessional, unrestrained, ridiculous project has in the past.
The second time I read Waiting For Britney Spears I found the novel greatly changed. It had never been a traditional “First Novel” from a young author, and the finished manuscript is even further from the crutches and foibles we typically associate with that genre. It is bold and experimental, a genre mutant, pink noir tracing the murder of the American dream. Jeff seamlessly bends tabloid history and what feels like lived in experience to show us how the celebrity sausage industry cranked its forcemeat in the aughts, focused on the prodigal pop starlet, anointed as both our TRL era-defining celebrity and America’s sin eater.
We throw around the phrase “destroyed by fame” but this book tapes the reader’s eyelids open and forces a slow, agonizing watch as the wunderkind plaid sex symbol is forcibly transformed from Goddess incarnate to mascara smeared husk. Waiting For Britney Spears won’t allow misremembering or conflation of the ephemeral moments of this both relatively recent and impossibly ancient story. It is a patient march down Golgotha, presented as Fury Road and paved with lip gloss and glitter. The stations of the cross are recast around regrettable marriages and disastrous awards show performances and bad haircuts, until the devastation is complete and the bones of our ersatz child bride are picked clean.
It is Weiss- a washed up college baseball player’s- swing from the heels for the latest iteration of the great American novel, yes fine in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson and Nightcrawler but also Martin Amis and The King of Comedy, delivered here at the very end of media and public literacy. No matter what pragmatic, reasonable, lucrative projects you have going or on the horizon, Waiting for Britney Spears will make you want to drop them immediately to write the one great book you have in you, as Jeff has.
The great Donna-Claire and I handled the edit for this ourselves, to maintain the thinnest veneer of integrity, but as I’ve intimated, if you’ve come here looking for an objective review of the novel and a provocative showdown interview, I’d go elsewhere, because I am not here today as a journalist but a fan who is unabashedly proud of their friend. So read on if you want an unfiltered, extremely privileged conversation exploring the process that went into writing the book of the season. And do remember, Waiting for Britney Spears is out now.
(Author’s Note: This interview has been HEAVILY edited and condensed to make me sound like less of an asshole)
(Second Author’s Note: We are joining media res, 10 minutes into the “Interview,” following an hour and a half of off-the-record conversation)
Jeff Weiss (performatively formal, semi-Chappelle White Guy Voice): …..I will not comment on any of these matters. I will not comment on what is true and what is untrue.
Ok, I’m glad this came up. There are two things I need you to do for me: One is be very clear about what is on and off the record. The other is, if I interrupt you, because this is a phone call and I have a really bad habit of doing that when I don’t have visual cues, tell me to shut the fuck up.
Jeff Weiss: Okay. So because we're being recorded, I'm wary about the “what is true/what isn’t true” element because I don't want anyone to ever know. The point of the book is what's “true” and what isn’t doesn’t matter. The whole thing is sort of a meta-referendum on the impossibility of knowing the whole truth about anything, and the tabloids having total primacy over that concept, which has affected modern life, which is why we're post-reality posters. I think it's more important to leave that mystery of what's true and what's false open.
Copy. My first obvious question that I'm imagining everyone in America is going to want to know the answer to is: Did Xzibit actually audition for Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes?
Jeff Weiss: It's plausible.
At what point, when you were watching Anora, did you realize that it's actually about Jason Alexander’s marriage to Britney?
Jeff Weiss: I never saw it.
Start to finish, how long did it take you to write the book?
Jeff Weiss: I mean, it depends on your metric of time, right?
Great start.
Jeff Weiss: Because like on some level, it took me 20 years from when I thought of the title until it actually came out. But did I know how to write the book at that time? No. My running joke about it was this is my Slaughterhouse Five. It took Vonnegut 25 years or something to figure out how to write about the firebombing of Dresden.
Only in this case the firebombing of Dresden was The 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.
Jeff Weiss: Exactly. Or marrying Kevin Federline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0TULnow
So let's start with the tangible blank page in terms of that, the minute you've actually figured out how to write the book.
Jeff Weiss: In 2015, I gave myself a hard deadline because I had the idea for so long, right? I was very high at Coachella, and I was reporting on the Beat Generation, a big story. I think it ended up running in 2017 at the Washington Post. But I wrote it mostly in 2015, and I interviewed Diane Di Prima, Herb Gold, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure.
And when I interviewed Diane Di Prima, her husband at the time said, “Don't ask Diane about Memoirs of a Beatnik because a lot of that book isn't true.” She was a phenomenal writer, but Memoirs of a Beatnik was like erotic fiction her publisher paid her double to put her name on. It's just like stories about her hanging out with Jack Kerouac and stuff in the village, and I think parts were true and parts were fiction, and I thought that was so interesting. And that’s when it started.
Have you ever read John Rechy’s City of Night?
I have not. He blurbed the book, right?
Jeff Weiss: One of my favorites. Yeah. He’s also become a dear friend over the last like 15 years. But the point I was going to make is City of Night is sort of what we would now call auto-fiction. It's like if Kerouac wrote On the Road about being like a gay hustler working his way through America in the late ’50s.
And he's not unremembered, if you know about John Rechy, you have the highest esteem for John Rechy, but I think he didn't get the acclaim he deserved, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that he was gay, he was Mexican American, and he was in Los Angeles in a homophobic, xenophobic, East Coast centric world.
The Big Three of prejudices.
Jeff Weiss: It’s a real thing. You don't get the attention as a writer, and he's phenomenal and has produced a lot of amazing work.
So 2015, the idea crystallizes around how you want to tell this story.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, I finally gave myself a hard deadline. It was like, 2017, I decided I had to go and just do it. And I wrote maybe 60 pages in Big Sur–maybe eight words of which made the final draft–and literally as I was about to leave Big Sur, LA Weekly, got bought, sold and destroyed. And that was when I led the boycott, which was an entire year of my life. And, then I started The LAnd. And then the week before we wrapped the magazine, my cat died of a heart attack, suddenly in my arms, this cat I'd had since I was a really young adult, this amazing, magical little creature I had found when I moved into my apartment, and he died.
I remember. You wrote a book about the cat, right? When we were in New Orleans, you were working on it.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, I had to because I didn’t want to forget any of it. I finished the book about the cat, which I almost sold and had a big agent behind it, but everyone was like, “Jeff Weiss, who the fuck is Jeff Weiss?” Because I wasn’t in that publishing matrix. No one cares about you, and then the pandemic happened.
Then during the pandemic, I did a piece for The Ringer about Britney, and a really wonderful editor from a small boutique publishing house reached out to me and was like, hey, I love this, are you interested in doing a book about Britney Spears and the 2000s and celebrity culture? And I said, “Well, have I got a story for you.” So I sent her the 60 pages and, you know, by the grace of God, she somehow liked it, and she said, it's great, but I need a book proposal. So I wrote one, her company rejected it, and then when I shopped it, 24 of 25 publishers rejected me. The only one that accepted it was FSG.
That is one hell of a “One in 25” place to land it.
Jeff Weiss: I'm very grateful to Sean McDonald and Jackson Howard for taking a chance on it because nobody else wanted to. Only one of the three agents that I sent to wanted to represent the book, which was Veronica Goldstein. I think there is a substantial bias against West Coast writers. There always has been, there always will be. And especially in LA., I think you're kind of naturally deemed shallow and vapid, which is what this book is riffing on.
You know what's so funny, man? I want to push back on this anti-West Coast narrative, I think you’re all doing pretty great in an amazing city, but I interviewed E-40 a couple months ago for a piece, and unprompted, he went on a rant that was almost identical to this, saying West Coast rappers never got the endorsements, never got the recognition or the respect. And maybe it's a Mad Men Elevator meme thing, but I was not aware of this perception, yet lately, for me, it comes up so often when you talk to West Coast artists.
Jeff Weiss: If you live here, it's unmistakable. I do think there's an L.A. bias. Is it as strong as it used to be? No.
I feel like at least half of my editors live there.
Jeff Weiss: They all lived in New York first. And maybe a worthwhile thing to put out is I've never lived in New York. I have a lot of friends in New York. I have a lot of editors I'm friends with in New York, but I will say one thing about Sean and Jackson, and maybe the only reason why they took a chance on my book is because Jackson's from Los Angeles and Shaun is from Southern California. And they understand it in a way where, I feel like writing from Los Angeles, there's a different sensibility.
Who are some of the influences on the book that aren't the Beats or Hunter S. Thompson? The less obvious ones that might’ve slipped in via osmosis.
Jeff Weiss: I mean, Salinger and Fitzgerald, but that’s obvious and boring. Italo Calvino is my favorite writer probably ever. Babitz. You’re pressing me, I’m looking at my bookshelf. Valley of Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea. Less Than Zero. William Styron. Chandler of course, Pynchon.
It seems absurd to say but I was going for, “What if Nick Carraway was Doc Sportello, but filtered through Eve Babitz, but it's 2005 L.A., chasing Britney Spears.”
Oh, right, so The Ringer piece happens……
Jeff Weiss: The piece came out in 2020. I wrote my proposal. I sold the proposal in 2021. I was still doing The LAnd. And then I finally got one week to start writing the book up in the mountains at this cabin in Kirkwood that belonged to a friend of Lucas Foster’s mom, who let me stay there to write. And Lucas had just died so I was a mess, and then there was a fire so I had to flee, great omen. So I go back home, and then three weeks later, Drakeo gets murdered.
Whoa.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah. I'm like, really fucked up. It felt like a biblical series of plagues. So finally, I wrote the LA Magazine piece about what I'd seen, and then I just got the fuck out of town and that was when it really started. It was the way to heal because I was so emotionally… For weeks after that, I would just start crying, you know? It was real trauma.
You saw a friend, and also a subject, get graphically murdered in front you.
Jeff Weiss: It was somebody that I'd become–I probably talked to this guy more than I talked to anybody in my life on the phone outside of like two people, my mom and my grandma. I'm backstage for his second show ever in Los Angeles. And it was just celebratory. And then all of a sudden… So, I just needed to process it. I needed to get the fuck out of LA.
So let's say February 2022 is when I started. I finished the first draft in January of 2023. That's what you read. And then I waited seven or eight months for notes. And then I got notes from my editor and started writing again in November 2023. And then I thought, oh, I can just do this in like two months, six weeks.
Yeah, sure.
Jeff Weiss: But I realized oh, no, you actually need to rewrite the entire book. You know, you read the draft. And I should probably shout out Paul Thompson, who helped me tremendously as well. He gave me incredible notes, one of the most brilliant editors I've ever worked with. So then I started writing in November. I finished in February, and that was one of the most grueling four and a half months of writing. If I could write seven days a week, I would. And everyone was just like, where the fuck is your book? I was supposed to have it turned around before the year was over, it was a lot of stress.
But isn't that the good stuff? When you feel like you're really cracking it and doing the work?
Jeff Weiss: It was an amazing feeling. So then I turned in my second draft, Jackson gave me a closer line edit. Then I had Paul look at it. He gave me more notes. And then, it probably was another month, month and a half of rewriting. So there was really a draft, one massive overhaul, a second draft and maybe a third draft. So I would say start to finish, straight writing, it was about 18 months, stretched over four years.
And also 10 years. So from first draft to final draft, what was the biggest change in your thinking and approach, and how did that manifest itself in the copy?
Jeff Weiss: I think I had to figure out exactly who the narrator was. And that was really hard because I had to find the balance of how much to give without giving too much, which was a byproduct of not knowing the exact recipe for the book. Between novel and tabloid biography, It wasn’t exactly defined, and my publisher understandably wanted more definition.
But I think what the proposal had going for it was they had faith both in me, which is something I’ve always had luck in with incredible editors- the ones I work best with just kind of let me be me- and in the concept. I think they looked at it and thought, it’s about Britney Spears, how bad can it be? In terms of interest, people are interested in Britney Spears. They always will be, I think.
Give me your personal fan/critic history with Britney, and then also let's segue into: Why Britney?
Jeff Weiss: I was a teenager, when she came out, and like so many others, I thought she was perfect. I really did, I thought she was everything a pop star should be. She's beautiful and she's an amazing dancer and her songs are bangers and she's got charisma and she's got this light shining in her eyes.
I was seduced. I think like a lot of us were, but it didn’t feel totally up to me. In the book, I'm like, how did I go from Suga Free and DJ Quik to all of a sudden realizing I like Britney Spears? If you think about when we were preteens, like there were no pop stars like Britney really. There was Madonna…
Michael Jackson, for me.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, and Janet Jackson, and I loved them, and they were pop stars, but they weren't sold or understood as teenage pop stars. And I hated the Backstreet Boys, and I hated NSYNC, and I really thought Justin Timberlake was the devil himself.
That comes across.
Jeff Weiss: And I feel like history truly absolved me on that one. But with Britney, I thought her songs were great. I thought her videos were great. And I was just in high school. So there was some psychic shift right between the mid ’90s and late ’90s, the infantilizing of pop culture. And it probably was a Clintonian, neo-liberal kind of conservatism. But when you're a kid, you're just kind of absorbing the vibes, right? And I guess I absorbed them to some degree. It was still “Wu-Tang Forever.” But suddenly there was also room for Britney Spears.
I was a Mandy Moore guy.
Jeff Weiss: Were you really?
Couldn’t tell you one song, maybe “Candy,” I think?
Jeff Weiss: That's so funny. I will say I wasn't really a Jessica Simpson fan, but referring back to a prior question, her book was the best of all, so props to her. That was another book that I read during the process.
And then “Why Britney?” Well, I mean, look, they sold her as the American Dream. That was how it was fucking marketed, vacuum sealed and delivered to us, the All-American Girl Doll of history. The thing about Britney is I feel she was one of those stars that had the ability to mean so many different things to so many different people. And to watch what happened to her as I’m doing tabloid journalism for years, in addition to a bunch of other things I did, but in that world, she was the center of the universe.
So I would literally find myself waiting for Britney Spears all the time. And so it became a metaphor for: When will my life become good? When will I find love? When will Britney Spears show up?
Have you seen Blonde?
Jeff Weiss: You know, I started reading the Joyce Carol Oates book, and I just thought it was awful. Thought it was one of the worst books ever read. I found it offensive on every level.
Did you watch the movie?
Jeff Weiss: No. Is it good?
People hate it, but I could not stop thinking about it while I was reading the book.
Jeff Weiss: I also read Norman Mailer's book, which I didn't really like, but I thought it was interesting that Mailer wrote a Marilyn book.
That idea of Britney as a human metaphor, you do a great job identifying that, but it’s funny, you just said she was sold as the American dream, I don't necessarily know if I saw or understood that before reading the book. Maybe it was a personal thing because I was more concerned with Big Pun and Cru at the time.
Jeff Weiss: Same. And by the way, I don't think I ever owned a Britney Spears CD, but I just knew every song somehow, because she was everywhere. You absorbed it. There was no opt out clause for Britney Spears. You breathed it in, and therefore you knew everything. In that era, everyone knew everything about Britney Spears. Even Stereogum, the early days of Stereogum, they like, were tracking Brittany assiduously, not in a stalker way, but like when Britney would do anything, Scott would cover it. That was like the news.
Let's talk about actual research, not the ephemeral stuff. I'm sure somewhere in Los Angeles there is a small storage space you have rented out that is packed top to bottom with Us Weeklys.
Jeff Weiss: It's like three crates, but yeah, that was the whole thing. I was on eBay obsessively for like a year buying every Us Weekly, every People. I actually didn't buy the Peoples because you could read those online, some OK magazines for sure.
There were also Britney fan sites that had everything written about Brittany that ever appeared on the internet, some gone now, so you can't even find this stuff anymore. And I read every Gawker post about Brittany because then they would link back to the original source a lot of the time, so I followed every link in the event the piece on the other side still existed. I read the Britney bios that were written in 2008-ish, 2009. I read Britney's mom’s book. I read Britney's sister's book. I watched like four or five documentaries about Brittany, including the rare ones, up to the conservatorship. I watched every YouTube video of Britney. I watched every music video.
Crucially, I had already interviewed a lot of her collaborators for that Ringer piece, the people that she wrote and produced the first two albums with. So I had a real understanding of what she did and what she was and the agency she had in making that music, which she did not get enough credit for.
What does spending a year or several years immersing yourself in nothing but tabloid history and writing do to your brain?
Jeff Weiss: You know, compared to social media, it's way better. I'd rather spend an hour reading Us Weekly than an hour on Instagram. I enjoyed it, honestly. It was fun. The hard part is writing. In research, you're kind of like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind with a bunch of tabloids and push pins and red string. It was interesting to the reporter in me, cross-jacking facts, I liked living in that world. It was more pleasurable than the present. My biggest condemnation of the present is that this era somehow evokes nostalgia, when inherently it should evoke no nostalgia. This era was rancid.
Did being rooted in that period and those weird social celebrity structures do anything to shift your perspective, your philosophy, your worldview?
Jeff Weiss: That's a good question. The thing that surprised me was how much the wheels were being greased for Trump. He's “Donald Trump” because he's in the tabloids. He and David Pecker were really good friends, and David Pecker is the guy that owns American Media, which owns Star Magazine, and now owns all the tabloids. And if you look really closely through these tabloids, you will find endless puff pieces on Trump and his family and Melania and Ivanka, they're all there.
It's like this soft drumbeat in the distance, but also right in front of you, and with hindsight you can see that clearly. And you see how this gentle propaganda is being disseminated and infecting American minds. Like catch and kill, that comes from the tabloids. So seeing the connection made explicit was really interesting and kind of made you realize that it's the stuff that we discount today, or just think of as innocent, that can ultimately have a nefarious end.
In the book Britney strikes me as one of these classic instinctual animals who simply knows how to navigate stardom, like Madonna or any of the great pop stars we’ve discussed from earlier eras, she’s able to just keep coming back again and again because she’s one of these special talents that has the whole court in front of her.
Jeff Weiss: She wasn’t writing the songs or making the beats, but to quote Jay, “Oh you made Hov? Go make another Hov.” You can’t. And that was the thing about Britney. She had this quality. She was a professional kid built for this, going back to the Mickey Mouse Club. Does Addison Ray have that quality now? I think she does. So does Charli [XCX], but it doesn't hit the same way anymore. She was a phenomenon, nothing can take over the world like that now, you know?
But then there's a thing, think of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” as her first great novel. She had nine years at the center of culture. And really more than that, because during the conservatorship, what most people don't realize is those are her biggest albums. She has multiple number one albums. Up until the one that she put out, with that G-Eazy feature, everything is dominant. And that Vegas show, I mean, that shit was like…
Was it good?
Jeff Weiss: It was interesting, right? Because it was like–the life in her eyes had been snuffed out. It was very robotic. You could tell that there was something up in that conservatorship. When you go back and watch the early videos, Britney on Ellen or Rosie O'Donnell, she’s radiant and completely full of life. And when I saw the Vegas show, the iridescence, the radiance of her star had- it was monochrome. It was good, but it was a department store pink.
How long does her Vegas show go for?
Jeff Weiss: A couple years, like three, four years.
And she's doing the same thing every night?
Jeff Weiss: I think multiple shows some days.
That would probably snuff out the light in my eyes too. So because this is The Follow, what was your experience navigating the contemporary publishing industry? Tell me about what you had to go through to get this to FSG, which I’d argue was the best place it could’ve possibly ended up.
Jeff Weiss: I don't know.
I mean, look, try to frame this in a way other writers who are going to read this, who might want to write a book someday might find useful. Things they could learn from your experience.
Jeff Weiss: Ok. I would just say if you have a really strong belief that something will work, then you have to blindly trudge forward and try to be as fearless as you can, and if it doesn't work, you'll probably be better off. My advice is if everybody rejected this book, I still would have written it, and maybe somebody would have bought it then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzabSdk7ZA
How do you think all the rejection this book faced reflects on the market?
Jeff Weiss: I got a lot of questions that I didn't feel were fair. It was almost antagonistic, where people were like, “Well, you're a man. Why would you write this?” That was a note that my agent got multiple times. I understand why you would theoretically want a woman to tackle it. And women should tackle it, and have tackled it. Britney Spears herself tackled it. But I think there is value in my specific perspective.
It's about the gaze. You're interrogating this phenomenon that millions and millions and millions of people were infatuated with. You heard the money in her voice.
Jeff Weiss: Britney appeals to everyone and is loved by everyone, but especially early on, who was one of the main demographics they were targeting? Straight white teenage boys, right? In the first chapter, I write, you'll want to date her. This is your ideal, this is who you should want to marry. And I lived my raps! I was out in the trenches. I got arrested on Brad Pitt's property. I was nationally humiliated at 23 years old.
I think it's cool, for whatever it's worth.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, well, it is now, but it's not when you when you're a nobody loser that was 23 years old, and all your high school friends are like, “Bruh, what the fuck is up with you? You look like an idiot, you sleazy, disgusting person.” And you're like, “No, I swear, I'm an artist!” And you think your career is over. It was horrible.
So in light of all the rejection, what do you think sold the book ultimately?
Jeff Weiss: Well, I knew FSG. I had a relationship with Sean McDonald through the LAnd, and Jackson from music writing.
So it sounds like your personal connection at FSG helped.
Jeff Weiss: It was 100% the personal connection to FSG. It's the only reason why it sold.
Well, look, I would say at least considering the early buzz, they were right to have faith in you. But I want to follow the thread, so you networked with FSG through The LAnd, that’s the connection, right?
Jeff Weiss: Yes. They took out like one or two ads.
So I think this is important to say for anyone reading this. When we say networking, your relationship to this publisher comes from you pursuing a passion project. That’s the connection, that’s the networking. It's not like you were a fun hang at a fucking party. You did something cool and valuable you believed in and you made an impression on these people when you had no reason to believe you’d ever have anything further to gain from them than selling them a few ads.
Jeff Weiss: Yes. And by the way, made no money off of [The LAnd]. I spent months of my life delivering the mag because it meant something to me. I was begging them to take out ads for their writers and they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, more or less. I was begging them to take out ads to keep my DIY, anti-estabablishment, fuck-LA-Weekly-publication alive. And they took out a few, and I was grateful. But yeah, that was how we met.
So aside from me nagging you for a galley, what has been the most annoying part of the promotion process?
Jeff Weiss: I'm really thankful that anyone cares. But you can't be the 1950s author where you sit back and wait for the book to drop. You have to make sure that everyone gets their galleys. Which means having to explain who this person is, why they matter. Reaching out to a bunch of writers. Reaching out to people about blurbs.
Favors. You have to ask for a lot of favors.
Jeff Weiss: You have to ask for a lot of favors. Yeah. There's kind of no way around it. And I'm grateful most people were really kind and charitable, but sometimes there were writers that didn't respond and I don't blame them or anything. It's a weird thing. Asking people for shit. It's a lot of unpaid work, and I don't like asking people for unpaid work if I don't have to. You know what I mean? It's like they have their own novels and their own life and their own stuff that they're working on. But that’s just the way publishing works in 2025.
Going back to what I would tell any young writer, just approach it like it’s DIY. You have to apply that spirit and ethos to everything that you do. And if you get something from the publisher or the publicist or someone wants to write about you, awesome. That's great. But don't expect shit. You have to just fight, you know? And if you don't advocate for yourself really loudly, nobody else will.
How much do your socials matter to a publisher? How do you view social media in your career? How is it related to the work of an author and the success of a book?
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because… Hold on one second. It’s the guy who is doing my visuals. He's asking me if I can send photos or videos from that era, running around with Oliver.
Wait, what the fuck? Is Oliver a real person? (Author’s Note: “Oliver” is a central character in the novel, based on a real aughts era pap photographer named Mel Bouzad, who Jeff actually worked with, who insists on being credited whenever possible) I thought he was a complete construction.
Jeff Weiss: Oh, is he ever. If you listen to the audiobook, it is me and Mel going back and forth. He was a real force of nature. At one point in his mid-20s, he was the biggest paparazzi in America. I insisted that all the photos on the book’s cover are Mel's photos.
My brain has been flipped inside out by this. Ok, completely derailed, but we were talking about whether or not your socials matter to a publisher and what role it plays in promotion.
Jeff Weiss: I mean socials matter to everything now, unfortunately. I hate that. The days of being Thomas Pynchon are long behind us. But I think with the decline of social media networks, I really don’t know where it’s all heading.
It does feel really broken. The last few weeks in particular, I've never been closer to just being like, I'm off of this thing.
Jeff Weiss: I get like, no engagement anymore. I think no one does. I look around and like, the only way to get engagement is Quote Tweeting about whatever is trending in the algorithm at that moment, and then they will hypercharge you. Or you have to be a right wing politics guy, or have something very contentious to say. It's become completely about division.
And then Instagram, that's a hundred percent now based on reels. It's like if you're posting static photos, forget it. Go look at an “influencer's” post, right? More often than not, they hide their likes. What that tells me is they're not even getting that many likes, these influencers, unless they're doing reels.
The reason why I’m still on social media is because I hold out hope that in some way it continues to lead to more writing work. That’s it. I don’t enjoy it at all and it makes me like the work I share on whatever platform less.
Jeff Weiss: There was this discussion that I was having with the PR people that I work with and the digital marketing people who told me everything now exists to be refracted via social media. And I hate that. But that's the reality. It's like if you got an article written about you, it only exists on socials. Half the time these publications don't even put it on Instagram.
It hurts my feelings when one of my pieces doesn't get a social push. And believe me, I'm petty and shallow and sensitive so I always check to see.
Jeff Weiss: No, dude, I did a huge story for [REDACTED] about [REDACTED] that didn't make Instagram, it drives you crazy.
And then you wonder, like, did they hate the piece?
Jeff Weiss: I don't think so. It just gets lost in the sauce.
Is there a playbook for how to promote a book online in 2025? Were you looking at any writers or books or rollouts that you thought did the work “the right way”, that you emulated in your rollout?
Jeff Weiss: I mean, I think whatever Hanif is doing, he clearly has the formula. He’s sort of the gold standard of how to promote a book in our world, right?
I think Shea is really good at it.
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, he's really good. Hanif and Shea both said nice things about the book. I'm really happy. But I mean, Hanif is really brilliant about the way that he promotes stuff, where it doesn't feel like it's being forced down your throat. He has done it in a way that feels punk. An “Our Band Could Be Your Life” style. And I admire that a lot. He has been doing it for a long time and he's built a real audience. And, you know, It doesn't have to exist through a publisher. It feels authentic to who he is. He's built his own path.
Not a specialty of mine. Nor is cultivating an army of shooters like Shea has, which is...
Jeff Weiss: Well, that's almost impossible.
He's like basically his own outlet, which is just so impressive. What has been the best feedback you’ve gotten so far?
Jeff Weiss: Oh man, the best was this woman who found the book in one of those lending libraries in a front yard in Park Slope. I guess someone didn't like it.
Someone put a galley in a fucking bird box?
Jeff Weiss: Something like that, yeah. So she found it and wrote a Substack review and she's like, I was skeptical. A guy named Jeff is writing a book about Britney Spears? And I was like, sister, I feel you. I'm here to say, I get it. But apparently she liked it.
Do you want to, or are you able to say how much you were paid for the entire process?
Jeff Weiss: You could say I got paid as much as journalists used to get paid for a long magazine story.
After the advance, how does the writer make money off their book?
Jeff Weiss: Well, if you don't get a big advance, which is unlikely in this day and age, you have to sell the foreign rights. I sold them, so for now it’s only available in Poland, but hopefully other countries want it so I can actually make money. And then, if you are a first time writer, what you make is comparable to the royalty rate of a major label deal, after the label recoups.
How did you navigate novel writing and journalism?
Jeff Weiss: It was almost impossible, to be honest with you.
But you got up pretty regularly over the last few years.
Jeff Weiss: I did, probably to the book's detriment, but what I would do was I would write for like a month or or six weeks if I could, or two months if I had a lucky stretch, but it was usually about a month. And then I would have to do two weeks of journalism to pay the bills, or bios, or whatever it was.
It was a hard break? You wouldn't jump between?
Jeff Weiss: It was almost invariably a hard break. And by the way, it's what I've always done with my career. The one for me, one for you thing. And I was only trying to take the more well paying journalism gigs because I couldn't afford not to, because I had to finish this book. Sometimes something would fall in your lap and you'd be stupid not to do it. You kind of have to do it. And I was lucky to have that: Work that would pay my bills. And in terms of schedule, I'm not an early riser, but I would wake up and try to get to work by like 10 if I could, knock out an hour of social media stuff for the website and the label, return the necessary emails.
And then I would try to write from like 11 to like 3 without breaks. I mean with, with minor 5 minute breaks or 10 minute breaks here and there.
Open the fridge. Close the fridge.
Jeff Weiss: And then I would try to break, work out, do an interview if I had to do an interview or something, and then I would try to write again from about 7 to like 10:30-11 and then from about 11 to about midnight I would jump on emails again and then try to go to sleep by midnight and do it again the next day.
And I can also attest that you're constantly editing, writing, doing shit for content on the site.
Jeff Weiss: Oh yeah. I was constantly editing the site and sending out emails for the site and dealing with publicists for the site and dealing with all the writers and fielding the pitches and you know, getting the artwork. Donna-Claire was definitely helping me during it, but it was really hard.
Reading the book, even as someone who very much lived through the period, I had a weird impression that the aughts are longer ago, and feel more alien to modern life than the 90s. You return to this era a lot in your writing. And I feel like it was a decade that was so radical, so much changed so quickly, and also that there was an almost immediate correction, where as soon as it ended we all kind of woke up from how we dressed and acted and the art we were into, and reversed course. But then there are also these ripples from that period still being felt today. Does any of that make sense?
Jeff Weiss: Yeah, totally. It felt like a neon nightmare. It was like 9-11 happens suddenly, and you're like, what the fuck? And then Iraq happens, and you're like, what the fuck? And then you wake up and you’re out of college and funneled into this fucking nether world where we’re all just looking around and wondering what happened to the life that I was sold?
The 2000s are like this weird bridge between analog and digital. And it's like, okay, this is the new world we're going to live in. But it's not quite there yet. We don't really know what it is.
The earth is freshly formed.
Jeff Weiss: People are establishing publications, figuring out blogs, it's really inchoate. And then all of a sudden, Obama and the financial crash, and by his second term, you're like, okay, that was a bad dream, right? It feels like the world is off on a better path now, we are going to get it together.
Or that was the perspective if you're living in our weird corners of the world. It feels like things have changed, but maybe there was irreconcilable damage done to the core.
Jeff Weiss: Yes, exactly. I think the online world had come up, and this is before TikTok, before Instagram really took over. It's really just Twitter and Facebook. And it turns out that actually all the things that get set into play in the mid 2000s are the things that disappear for a while, but it's like almost like fucking herpes or something.
It's like the 2000s was where America got fucking herpes. And I feel like that world that the 2000s incubates is the permanent reality now. We tried to course correct but it was too late.
Put that on a t-shirt. How has the celebrity content industry changed since the 2000s?
Jeff Weiss: I think the world doesn't really exist now in the same way, and I think that's part of the point of the book. It ends with the iPhone coming in. And with Instagram, basically, everything's a video now. There is no need for photos the same way. Or paparazzi, or writers. Like, dude, there were these parties, magazine sponsored parties. Tech companies sponsored parties. It was a gold rush, right? There's so much capital flowing from fucking Silicon Valley to New York and L.A. and a lot of it is going to L.A because all the celebrities are there and they want them to appear at their parties. It was incredible.
And I had just gotten out of college, and there's no journalism jobs. And, this era and this [Tabloid] profession was the hottest thing in journalism. There were articles written about this. I think I quoted a Washington Post piece where they're like, the hottest thing in journalism is tabloids and celebrity coverage, which consumes everything because, what is influencer culture, creator culture if not the byproduct of this? The commodification of celebrity is a religion. And, it really starts here, and now we're living in this world. And meanwhile everyone's like, you'll never make it as a writer. We're now going on decades of people being like, you'll never make money writing–
And we haven't.
Jeff Weiss: No. They were right.
Do you know if Britney is aware of the novel?
Jeff Weiss: I have no idea. I mean, I hope–I don't know. I can't imagine that she would read it. But, I mean, like, also–I'm sure it'd probably be too weird for her. I think the book is sympathetic, I didn't want to write anything that was disrespectful to Britney, but I didn't want it to be some kind of fan servicey thing either. You know what I mean?
There is a part of me that feels like it's on some level kind of exploitive, how could it not be? Britney is obviously a person, with real feelings and real emotions and people who love her and I strove to maintain her humanity through the book. But then there's this other reality, where she exists as a symbol for many people, and the reality we inhabit is everyone is a public figure now, and when you’re a significant public figure, you’re open to this sort of scrutiny.
And as you point out in the book, at a certain point she’s working hand in glove with the tabloids and dating a paparazzi. Do you think she might take exception to serving as a symbol for the death of the American Dream?
Jeff Weiss: Of course, I mean, she's alive. But I’d just say it’s more about us, what we get from her, what we took from her. There's a great mystery at the core of Britney, right? You're like, what happened? Was it mental health? Was it her father? Was it her family? Was it just drugs? Was it the conservatorship?
One of the biggest ways the book changed the way I thought about that history is the way the conservatorship is set up in the book. By the time it happens, even though you know what nightmare is like coming for her, it almost feels like an act of mercy. She was clearly in deep pain and just not happy and not in control of her life.
Jeff Weiss: That was the thing, right? This has been all memory holed. Many of these tabloids don't exist online. I think it spoke to the journalist in me, the stuff that has impacted my life and my mind, the experiences that I've had.
And in terms of Britney, I watched enough of it firsthand to know how demented it was, what was being done to her. And so I tried to write about it with empathy, but also with clarity. If you watch these documentaries about Britney, and I'm not knocking these documentaries about Britney, or if you read her book, which again, I'm not knocking her book. She has every right to tell her story the way that she remembers it, right? But one of the reasons I didn't do that much reporting in present day, why I was relying mostly on primary sources from the moment the book is set is because-
It's about now.
Jeff Weiss: It's not about now, and it's also, I don't trust memory. Because people remember the past in the light of the present. If they even remember it at all, but they're going to filter it through the lens of their agendas and where we ended up and sort of reverse engineer shit, and it's not honest. Whereas if you do enough research and you read all these accounts and cross check them, I think you can find an approximation of the truth, what actually happened, the closest we can call it.
So let's say, if you had a dream for Britney discovering this, being into it, having an opportunity to have some interaction with her, do something with her in relation to the book, what would it be?
Jeff Weiss: God, I don't know.
Would you want to have a conversation with her about this book?
Jeff Weiss: No, I don't think so. I can only imagine it would feel too personal. I would hope she wouldn't read it. It's kind of like when I interviewed Kendrick once, I think it was 2014. Like right after Good Kid and before Butterfly. And I think Punch was there. Dave Free might have been there. He was about to perform at a show, and I had just interviewed Kendrick for maybe an hour, and then I was like, okay, well, while I'm here I should do secondaries. And then Kendrick left the room. He said, I don't want to hear this. And I think that was really brilliant.
And I would hope that Britney would just, if she had to deal with this, she’d get the fuck out of the room, you know? It would probably be too personal. I'm sure she would say, who are you to tell my story? And I think I would answer, it's not just your story. It's not entirely your story.
Unfortunately, her story kind of became the world’s story, and it merged with a lot of other people's stories.