“There was always an uphill battle to overcome the assumptions, to prove that I wasn’t the tabloid villain people expected,” Kevin Federline explains in his new memoir, You Thought You Knew. What was on the other side of that hill for Britney Spears’s most infamous ex? A successful dance career? An esteemed rap album? A grounded life with his then-four children — two with Spears and two with ex Shar Jackson? Sadly, none of the above: “This,” Federline writes, referring to his notorious reputation, “made it really difficult to build my own brand.”
What was and is Kevin Federline’s brand is a mystery that’s long sat off to the side of his ex-wife’s spiraling up and out. Though You Thought You Knew, out October 21, briefly touches on his dance career and half-hearted attempt to make a record, mostly Federline wants to set the record straight: All that he is — and all that he’s ever done — is for the benefit of his kids. Federline, you see, is a #BoyDad, and part of what he’s doing in belatedly airing out his dirty laundry with Spears is setting the record straight for those two. (Well, six kids total.) “But as my kids get older, I see it differently. I don’t want them growing up feeling like they have to explain who their father is. If people want answers, let this book carry them. Because I want my kids to know: their dad told his story. And he told it with truth,” Federline writes in the introduction. In You Thought You Knew, Federline both cashes in and checks out of the story that’s come to define him for so many years, with little eye toward what comes next.
The truth Federline writes toward is absolution: He no longer wants to take the blame for all the bad things that happened in his two-year marriage with Spears between 2004 and 2006 (though he claims to have been blindsided by her filing for divorce, Federline admits he had been thinking about it also). As they navigated split custody in 2007, the year in which she experienced her very public meltdown, Federline seemed to embrace his reputation as a villain both on- and offscreen. But now, with their kids more or less grown, he is ready to play the hero. Per his own description, Federline is a humble once-backup dancer from Fresno, a guy who loves life and loves women and loves having kids, and any proximity to fame is merely a side effect of wanting to have a family-forward life. You Thought You Knew sits on a pedestal of defensive posturing, retroactively setting the record straight after the dissolution of Spears’s conservatorship. With regards to Spears, specifically, he seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. Federline feels bad for her — but there is a limit to that sympathy, in part because of her alleged mistreatment of their sons.
There are all sorts of nasty, lurid details about how Spears treated her children, ranging from drinking while breastfeeding to standing in their doorway with a knife in her hands. Federline shares these stories to explain why he advocated for greater custody of his sons, but he’s quick to jump into ad hominem attacks against Spears when he can. In a confrontation with one of her sons, he refers to her as “Joan Crawford on crack,” and later describes her actions as “creepy as fuck.” Federline maintains, throughout all of this, he never talked poorly about her to them. “She constantly bad-mouthed me in front of them, calling me lazy, a piece of shit, and claiming I was taking all her money. They wanted to love her and respect her, but they were being bombarded with negativity and lies, while I never once bad-mouthed her to them,” he explains. Now’s his chance, however, not only to set the record straight but get in a few shots of his own. Any time Federline drifts too far into settling the score, he returns to his #BoyDad roots, kvelling about how proud he is of his boys.
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It’d be one thing, maybe, if Federline’s memoir was about parenting specifically — how he found a grounded peace in parenting after years of tumult in his relationship with Spears — but he is too keen to name-drop famous friends (Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent) and less famous friends (guys with monikers like “Big Rick” and Jimmy and Marty and maybe his closest friend: his lawyer, Mark Kaplan, who always gets a first-name, last-name treatment for some reason) and regale the reader with stories about his partying days. He might be a dad, but he’s still a cool dad — one who used to do a lot of cocaine. “I was living in extremes: a responsible, devoted dad one day, a reckless party animal the next,” he says. Federline makes his partying sound like a reaction to his domestic stresses rather than a pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. He admits time and time again he’s not perfect, but every story he tells about how he balanced parenting with his fame has him coming out on top. But unlike Spears, he’s been able to shed that which once made him infamous, and Federline holds it over her the whole book.
Spears responded to Federline’s memoir on October 15, writing on her Twitter, “The constant gaslighting from ex-husband is extremely hurtful and exhausting.” She affirmed that her relationship with her sons, Preston, 20, and Jayden, 19, is strained, adding that she has seen them sparingly over the last several years, blaming Federline directly for the dissolution of their relationship. What, exactly, did Federline think would happen in writing a book like this? For all that he claims to want Spears to get better, You Thought You Knew is mostly about clearing his own name at the expense of hers, all of which has been done with their sons in the middle.
