Structure

“I Killed Britney Spears” by Jean Hannah Edelstein is an essay, a short piece of writing in which the author presents her own arguments with regards to a specific topic.

Like most structured short texts, “I Killed Britney Spears” is organised according to the following elements: title, introduction, main body, and conclusion.

Title

The title of the essay is eye-catching and intriguing. The title suggests the parallels that the author draws between her and the pop star. The title is also key to the text’s themes as the essay explores the way people who follow celebrities...

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Introduction

The essay begins with the first line of the Britney Spears’ song “Gimme More”, “It’s Britney, bitch” (p. 157, l. 1) and continues with a short description of some key moments that marked the decline of Britney Spears’ celebrity status:

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Main body

The main body presents the writer’s relationship with the celebrity, focusing on how the writer and Britney Spears’s lives unfolded through the years.

The ideas presented in the main body are separated by lines from some of Britney Spears’s most famous songs which ironically announce what each paragraph is going to be about.

The line “She’s so lucky, she’s a star/ but she cries, cries, cries in her lonely heart” announces how the writer discovered Britney’s music and how she felt that she and the pop star had similar lives, as well as the fact that the writer envied Britney’s fame.

The writer compares herself with Britney when they were both teenagers.

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Conclusion

The conclusion of the essay is announced through another line from one of the pop star’s songs: “With a taste of a poison paradise/ I'm addicted to you/ Don't you know that you're toxic?” (p.160 ll. 22-23)

The lyrics are used with an ironic intention, as the writer targets readers of tabloid magazines who, by continuing to feed on tabloid news (addicted to the sad stories being printed), contributed to the decline of the pop star.

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