There were names mentioned in Britney Spears‘ bombshell memoir The Woman in Me that likely would have preferred to be left out of the narrative altogether. But Mariah Carey wasn’t too worried when she first heard that she had come up within its pages. She hadn’t read it herself, but Jimmy Kimmel did the honors of revealing the passage to her during her recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“At one award show, I knocked on Mariah Carey’s dressing room door, she opened it and out poured the most beautiful otherworldly light,” he read directly from the book. “You know how we all have ring lights now? Well, more than 20 years ago, only Mariah Carey knew about ring lights. And no, I can’t just say her first name. To me, she’s always going to be Mariah Carey.”
Carey embarked on a brief tangent about the history of the ring light but reeled it in to add: “By the way, that was super sweet what Britney said about me.” Before Kimmel had even started reading, he assured the singer that it wasn’t anything bad, to which she replied: “I love her, actually.”
Kimmel also discussed the memoir with Christina Aguilera when she appeared on the show a few weeks ago, asking: “Do you think you will be in it? Has she called you and said, ‘Hey, heads up?’” She hadn’t, but also wasn’t necessarily hoping that she would. “Am I hoping? I mean, I’m hoping that, you know, everything is all good with her and everything’s beautiful. I think the future should be celebrated,” Aguilera shared, adding: “Let’s put it this way. I’d rather be it you than me. So hopefully you’ll be in it. You’ll make the book.”
Kimmel is, needless to say, not in The Woman in Me. Spears did, however, devote many pages to her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, pulling back the curtain on long-held secrets of their brief but intense relationship. In one instance, she recalls reading Aguilera and Timberlake’s shared Rolling Stone cover story in 2003.
“While the news about me was often not all that friendly, the entertainment press was full of positive stories about Justin and Christina Aguilera,” she wrote. “They were together on the cover of Rolling Stone, him in a black tank top, looking at her with sexy eyes, her looking out at the camera, wearing a lace-up black shirt … In that story, she said she thought Justin and I should get back together, which is just confusing, given how negative she’d been elsewhere.”
She also mentions Colin Farrell, Natalie Portman, Madonna, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, Ryan Gosling, and more within the book, which recently became a No.1 New York Times best-seller with 1.1 million copies sold within a week of its release.
