I Watch the Witch Burn

Reece Sisto reviews Jeff Weiss’s “Waiting for Britney Spears.”

By Reece SistoJune 29, 2025

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

I WALK PAST the organic juicery on Sunset. Its slouching marquee screams “COFFEE: IT’S GOOD AS F*CK,” the exterior plastered with adverts for a festival appearance by Paris Hilton—2007 was very loud, and now it seems to reverberate. Down the street at Intelligentsia, when I ask why I haven’t heard a song released within the last decade, the barista, under the promised aegis of anonymity, confesses they use Pandora. Women: hordes of them in verbose, graphic baby tees, low-rise everything, even the occasional Bumpit. They’re all smiles—everyone’s fucking loving it, libfected with HOPE in the Obama sense of the word. I’m confused and frustrated, as though I’ve stumbled back in time in a pair of Heelys, or I’m trying to make fetch happen. The uninitiated might call it nostalgia, but I think it’s better described as arrested. It seems we’re “dancing on the ashes of culture”—at least that’s how Jeff Weiss described it at the launch party for his new, debut book Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly!, a novel that provokes the question we’ve all been asking in the denouement of Trump bombing Iran: what have we learned since 2001?

Apparently, nothing at all. Histrionic, maybe, but not necessarily untrue. At the very least, Weiss’s claim places his otherwise hard-to-categorize book tidily into a literary—oratory?—tradition: eulogy. But while he and I probably agree on the raw merits of his book (a master class in gonzo journalism, an immediate cultural artifact, an iconic Künstlerromanic tear), I’m not sure I share his cynicism. Maybe I was too young during Britney’s rise and fall, but I actually found the book inspiring, full of a hope of the more Occupy Wall Street variety—that is, genuine, or at least respectable.

More than an incredible and uniquely intimate account of Britney’s dismantlement by the paparazzi, Waiting dares to speak about coming-of-age in the bust of the dot-com boom: it sucked. (Again, nothing’s new.) We follow Britney as her otherwise normal struggles with young adulthood—experimenting with drugs, bad sex, worse men—are spun into harrowing, salacious tales for panoptic consumption. We roast her over a fire, burn her to a crisp. She was lost; at that age, many of us are, including Weiss. In the end—spoiler—I wouldn’t say he’s “found,” but he certainly knows what he doesn’t want, which is better than being lost. Any direction is better than none, even if it’s just “away.” Ever seen an own goal? If only they’d known to run the other way!

This might not be the best allegory. From the benders and her lead foot to kidnapping-lite and literally running away from rehab, Britney is the queen of own goals; still is, based on her frequent short-circuiting on Instagram. Knowing what she didn’t want was famously not enough to curb her downfall, not that she was ever given a choice. Notably, the book ends when Britney’s conservatorship begins, and Britney isn’t our protagonist—Weiss is (or at least, a lightly fictionalized version of Weiss whom, for purposes of clarity, we’ll call Jeff). Locked into his own early-twenties existential tailspin, Jeff is desperate to become a writer, but also to pay rent. He settles for something not quite in the middle: tabloid reportage at a fictional (but so thinly veiled) magazine called Nova. He doesn’t want to be tailing Britney with the dregs of L.A. society for a vampiric gossip rag, but he needs money, and money they’ve got. Nights in palatial Las Vegas hotels; helicopters rented or pirated to snap shots of Britney that will sell for more than Jeff makes in a year; booze-forward espionage at the Playboy Mansion and clubs so exclusive, Tara Reid is languishing outside, desperate to get in. Glamour is often gross.

Celebrity high jinks to the tune of your monthly rent isn’t necessarily a bad gig, but it is a short hedge behind which pathological critters creep. Jeff can’t stop chasing Britney. It’s all a bit like the weed he’s constantly smoking: a welcome distraction from his listlessness that devolves into a smog of fumbled connections, anxiety, and insatiable munchies for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and celebrity crash-outs. In short, it’s addictive, and addicts tend to find one another. He’s there for all of Britney’s worst, most addled moments—the vaporized MTV Video Music Awards performance, the buzzed head, the car chases and overdoses and ear-popping breakdowns—so close he can smell the Red Bull on her breath.

Impossibly close, some might say. “Allegedly” is the operative word here, at least insofar as it abates a potential lawsuit. I, for one, don’t care. Weiss writes with the effortless panache of the smartest sot at the bar, spitting hard truths and saliva with impressive reach. I ignore the spit, the unbelievability, because I’m enraptured, assured by his sensory and emotional vividness that regardless of what’s real, it’s all more or less true. Drunk words, sober thoughts, whatever. This feels particularly overdue in the case of Britney, the fastidious documentation of her life having come at the direct expense of her health and sanity.

As you’ve probably gathered, I don’t think we’ve learned much since then. The smartphone was the death knell for the paparazzi. Suddenly everyone became painfully, minutely visible, and control around a celebrity’s image was suddenly decentralized, even partially reclaimed. Celebrities now make cameos in our TikToks, they crash my house parties, they share in drugs and American Spirits without fear of national reprisal. Twenty years ago, Lindsay Lohan’s and Kate Moss’s respective dalliances with cocaine were top-tier tabloid fodder; today, they wouldn’t even break through my algorithm. Nothing is glamorous anymore, only gross. One might think this would make the playing field a bit more level, things feel a bit more human. Instead, we’ve just got a metastasizing peanut gallery. Sabrina Carpenter’s Eiffel Tower erupted on social media, her sexuality an ongoing spark for moral panic among the dimmest corners of the Right and Left alike. If it’s not fans denigrating the stars, it’s the stars siccing their fans. Celebrities are more accessible in the way that fish in aquariums are: advancements in technology probably make the glass between us thinner, but we’re still going to drown if it breaks. At worst, we used to envy celebrities; now, like the fish, we’re probably more likely to pity them. I’m not sure which feels worse.

Doesn’t matter. Neither situation is particularly healthy for either side of the glass—or velvet rope—but at least with Britney there was collectivity to the hunt. I imagine it was exhilarating, chasing a witch to the stake, seeing if she’d burn. It seems that reading the tabloids was. Today, I watch the witch burn through enameled eyes and multiple screens. Dogpiles online may or may not be better, psychologically speaking, for celebrities, but they are certainly more boring. Waiting is aware of this cultural torpor and responds with thrilling literary exuberance, mimicking the feverishness we came to expect of a story hot off the press. I could not put it down; I had to know what happened next, even when I already knew. But beyond being a damn good story, Waiting’s major accomplishment is its ability to enthrall without a sacrificial lamb—or woman. Weiss shades the witch’s burnt corpse in the most sympathetic light, granting her something like a proper burial. He feels bad for his contribution to Britney’s conflagration yet atones without miring himself, or us, in self-flagellation. Waiting feels like a rite of passage to that realm that waits beyond, a canoe papier-mâchéd by all the forgotten tabloids to cross the River Styx. Looking back is canonically not the answer. The only way out is through, and what better way through intrapersonal strife than forgiveness? Since it’s not coming from Britney—neither Weiss nor anyone else is getting that—it can at least come from himself.

Forgiveness becomes a kind of grieving. Grieving with Weiss isn’t particularly sad—it’s actually quite funny—but it does seem to extend beyond Britney, to a Los Angeles he believes he’s lost to social media, Gen Z undersocialization, and the ripple effects of austerity, a city he sees as having fallen off alongside his book’s titular star. This may be the point on which I dare say Weiss got something wrong. It’s true that people are always begging us to forget about Los Angeles, to stop throwing parties here, to depoliticize it, and those voices often succeed. But if 2025 has revealed anything at all, it is that L.A. is impossible to ignore. Historic fires, mass protests, Orwellian abductions by a fascist government—sorry New York, but L.A. is still that girl, the truest, scariest darling of the American cultural imagination. Just the other day I was tucked away on a concrete lanai outside Grand Star, spooning a cigarette into Anya Taylor-Joy’s mouth as we mutually admonished the actual Natasha Bedingfield, drunk off her ass singing over the bar’s crunched-out sound system, for choosing “Unwritten” over “Pocketful of Sunshine” for her Chinatown debut. Self-soothing through proximity to relevance? Yes, and! Such becomes true of anyone who lives here long enough. Los Angeles is an absurd place, one in which we find ourselves brushing shoulders with celebrities and climatological disaster and federal troops in ways surreal in magnitude yet ordinary in frequency. Here, exception is the rule. Despite Weiss’s pessimism, I found Waiting to be a testament to that fact, a totem of a city and a girl intransigent in their relevance, no matter how much the rest of the world insists otherwise.

I’m making this book sound sappy when it’s really, really not. Down to the line level, Waiting is a fun house for language, mirrors throwing back words that have been warped with new and inventive meanings yet are nonetheless crystal clear. “Medellín slalom” for railing cocaine? “Gargoyle” as a verb? Jeff—like Weiss—is singularly imaginative, but more than anything he’s right there, whispering in my ear, a bad bitch with a fat rack and a snake’s tongue. Like the tabloids he helped make famous, Jeff bears all without sincerity, in fact with a voice wet and sour with the poison of irony. I’m never asked to care; I care against all odds.

When I first heard Britney Spears, I was five years old, escaping interminable reruns of the Twin Towers collapsing to dance to “I’m a Slave 4 U” with my sister in her bedroom. She was 11 years my senior; it had not occurred to me until then that she was anything other than a babysitter, much less a dance partner, a friend, someone with whom I could share a cultural touchpoint. Waiting similarly bridges this gap. Maybe things are worse now, or at least the charade of promise has disintegrated, but isn’t clarity the first step toward change? When the dust from the car chases and the haze from weed settle, we find Jeff with his own marquee, trumpeting a simple truth: not much is different, but everything could be.