The narrator of L.A. author Jeff Weiss’s “Waiting for Britney Spears” happened to be in the right place at the right time.
It was August 1998, the last Friday of summer school at Venice High, and the narrator is wandering the halls when he notices a propped-open gym door, only to find that a music video is being filmed inside. He talks his way into being an extra in what would become the video for Spears’ “…Baby One More Time,” one of the most enduring pop songs of the 1990s.
It was a crazy coincidence, and even crazier is the fact that it actually happened. …Or did it?
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The subtitle of Weiss’ book is “A True Story … Allegedly,” and he acknowledges that the book is a mixture of nonfiction and fiction. It tells the story of the narrator’s years as a tabloid spy in L.A., trying to uncover hot celebrity gossip about a host of stars, including Spears.
Weiss did indeed work for tabloids in L.A., although it wasn’t his first choice for a job when he left college.
“I would’ve killed for anything that was remotely legitimate,” he says. “I was desperately hustling to try to cobble together any kind of subsistence income, but tabloids were the only people that wanted to hire me.”
Weiss has since gone on to a career in non-tabloid journalism, including a stint as a columnist for LA Weekly, with bylines in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, and more. He also founded Passion of the Weiss, a hip-hop blog with its own record label, POW Recordings.
“Waiting for Britney Spears” was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux division MCD to positive reviews. He spoke about his book via telephone via New York, where he was on a book tour. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you talk about the first time that you encountered Britney Spears?
Obviously, there’s a fictional component of the book, so I’m kind of loath to go through what is fact and what’s fiction to preserve a sense of mystique about it. I wanted to have a “Star Is Born” moment when Britney does the “…Baby One More Time” video.
If you were going to meet Britney Spears, that would be the time to do it. It was a supernova explosion. They shot the music video at Venice High School, which is where they shot “Grease.” People were yearning for a nostalgic past, and she was ultimately the perfect product.
I don’t even consider the narrator necessarily the main character. He’s one of them. He’s always watching from a distance. So I thought it makes a lot of sense to have that symbolic mirroring of the distance. It starts with distance, it ends with the distance, and you’re sort of just watching this destruction of this symbol, this great creation of American pop culture.
Q: When you first conceived of the book, did you know that you wanted to make it a mix of nonfiction and fiction?
I came up with the title around 2005. I literally found myself waiting for Britney Spears. It was a “Waiting for Godot” kind of thing where you’re just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere and you’re like, “Is Godot going to show up? Is Britney going to show up?” That’s the thing about a book. You don’t include the situations where nothing happens because the majority of the time you’re just sitting there all day long and nothing happens. Which I loved, to be honest with you. Those were my favorites. But I wanted to write a pure novel, and then it took me a while to figure out what should have been so obvious: that most of the novels that I loved were proto-autofiction. I loved the Beats when I was in my late teens and early 20s.
I studied history in school. A lot of what I do is first-draft, history-type journalism. So I’ve always seen myself as somebody in a tradition, and I loved not just the Beats, but also the New Journalists, and what they were doing was such a blend. You always hear stories about [Truman] Capote and “In Cold Blood,” then you think about it and you’re like, “Yeah, I bet a lot of those quotes are fabricated.” So that was kind of the idea, but I wanted to just be honest about it, and not be like, “OK, this is 100 percent nonfiction.” Especially now, because as the book gestated in my head, our culture had this radical shift towards post-truth.
Q: Was your publisher initially receptive to the idea?
It was really hard to explain to everybody, to be honest. I don’t mind saying that everybody rejected it. I had an editor that was interested in a book on this subject. She had seen a piece I wrote for The Ringer in 2020 on “Oops!… I Did It Again.” She reached out to me and she asked if I was interested in doing a book in this world of early 2000s celebrity and Britney Spears? And I was like, “Well, I have the book for you.” And I just got really rejected by every major publisher. I got rejected by the indie publisher that this editor had wanted to query. I sold it to [Farrar, Straus and Giroux] at the end. [MCD/FSG publisher] Sean McDonald’s a really brilliant person, and he deserves a ton of credit for taking a chance on the book. I don’t know if FSG necessarily knew where I was going to go. They took a leap of blind faith, and obviously, I’m really grateful for that, because I don’t think that it was clear where it was going to end up. I knew I wanted this hybrid thing, but people don’t want hybrids. It’s hard to market something like that.
Q: Did you do any research into how Spears was covered in the tabloids at the time?
I’m the world’s greatest collector of US Weeklys, Star Magazines, and OK! magazines. Once a week, I’d check eBay for any issues [with stories about Spears] that would come in, and I would cross-check them because so much of this has been memory-holed and just doesn’t exist in the Internet world. I found that the tabloids were more right than they were wrong. I don’t want to say the tabloids were always right, obviously, they clearly weren’t. But I really wanted all the history to be accurate, while acknowledging the impossibility of total accuracy. That’s one of the themes of the book: Who knows? Who will ever know? There’s such a mystery at the core of all of this stuff.