Sometimes the only way to say ‘mother, I’m afraid I’ve been having it off with a rough chap from church and now I’m bally well pregnant’ is in a letter.

And sometimes the only way to sell copies of your memoir about what a slapdash job you appear to have done of raising your children is to discuss that highly private letter on live TV.

Lynne Spears knows that only too well, because she’s been pimping her new book Britney Spears: My Part In Her Downfall by telling the Today show about the hilarious time that Jamie Lynn Spears was so eaten up by the crippling shame of her teenage pregnancy that she couldn’t even tell Lynne about it face to face and had to write a note instead – a note which left Lynne Spears weeping with uncontrollable anguish and the stark realisation that she’d unquestionably failed as a mother. Good times.

It’s always nice to see people learn from their mistakes, isn’t it? Take Lynne Spears, for example. She’s made her mistakes in the past – like the time she pushed her two kids into showbusiness from an exceptionally young age at the cost of their childhood just so that she could piggyback on their fame – but you won’t see her doing anything like that again.

No sir. It may have taken one horrifying mental breakdown and a teenage pregnancy to work that out, but it doesn’t matter, because Lynne Spears will never exploit her childrens’ fame again – so much so that she’s started doing television appearances to promote her book about never exploiting her childrens’ fame again.

Lynne Spears’ book Britney Spears: A Warning From History has already made the headlines for the way that it reveals how Britney Spears lost her viginity as a child. But, worried that she might be giving a false impression that Britney is her only car-crash offspring, Lynne Spears has gone on TV to explain what a monstrous little brat Jamie Lynn Spears is as well.

Oh, we’re only kidding. It’s unfair to call Jamie Lynn Spears a monstrous little brat just because she got knocked up while she was still at school. But it’s totally cool to imply that she is by suggesting that she was too cowardly to verbally admit her pregnancy to her mother and had to resort to a scrawled note instead. So we’ll do that.

After all, it’s what Lynne Spears sort of did herself on the Today show yesterday. She said:

“I thought it was a joke… I kept waiting for the punch line. I was just truly in shock and then I started to cry. And then she started consoling me at that point.”

Actually, what Lynne Spears doesn’t understand is that it actually was just a joke. Jamie Lynn Spears – notorious prankster that she is – had in fact written the following on the back of the note:

“Punk’d! I totally just punk’d you mom. Of course I’d never get pregnant! I’m only 16 and wouldn’t dream of having sex, especially with this stupid-faced idiot. I mean, look at him. He looks like the product of decades of institutionalised incest. This couldn’t possibly be anything but a ridiculous joke.”

However, Lynne Spears took the news so badly with all the tears and the self-blame that Jamie Lynn Spears decided that, rather than admit to the joke and confuse her mother any further, she’d go and immediately get pregnant anyway, even though it’d ruin the rest of her life.

Oh Lynne Spears, if only you’d have turned the note over, life would have been so very different. Mostly in that we wouldn’t have had to keep writing about your sodding book all the bloody time.

On the basis that wearing a nice dress and not crying is the best sign of mental recovery, Britney Spears is clearly back to her best.

So there’s obviously no better time to publish a book about Britney Spears; primarily her struggle with mental illness and her amazing revival. Admittedly it’s still early days – Britney could have a relapse tomorrow and start throwing animals off motorway bridges, rendering the whole book obsolete – but there’s nothing like striking while the iron’s hot, is there?

That’s what Britney Spears’ mother Lynne Spears thinks, because her Britney Spears book Through The Storm comes out next week. Copies have already leaked, and it seems it’s more about what a brave and inspiring mother Lynne is than anything else. Which is true – Lynne Spears has bravely inspired us never to have kids in case we end up raising them as terribly as she’s done with hers.

We’ve always thought that Lynne Spears was an excellent mother. No really, we did. It must be harder than it looks to have two children and then deprive them of a normal childhood so that you can relentlessly pursue your dream of living vicariously through your childstar offspring, only to watch it blow up in your face when they become so maladjusted to real life that one of them gets knocked up while still at school and the other one shaves her hair off in public and calls herself the devil.

For that, Lynne Spears deserves a medal. It’s true.

She won’t get one, of course, so second-best is her new book Through The Storm. You might remember Through The Storm as the parenting guide that Lynne Spears was going to publish right before Britney went barmy and Jamie Lynn got herself pregnant. Well, realising that reading a parenting guide by Lynne Spears would be a bit like reading Dr Harold Shipman’s Guide To Looking After Granny, Lynne scrapped that idea and decided to retool the book as an explosive tell-all.

We already knew that the book would claim that Britney Spears was sex-and-drugged to the wazoo by the time she was 15, but now the Associated Press has managed to snatch a look at a preview copy of the Through The Storm, and has given it a little summary. SPOILER ALERT: Britney Spears goes a bit mental near the end:

In “Through the Storm,” Lynne Spears presents herself as a loving, selfless (she gave up her job as a school teacher for her daughter’s sake) but increasingly powerless parent. After the jolting, but pleasant surprise of Britney Spears’ debut smash, ” … Baby One More Time,” Lynne Spears says she felt she was losing control when a 1999 Rolling Stone magazine story featured a racy cover of the singer in panties and a bra.

And that’s where it all went wrong, you see. Not several years earlier when Lynne Spears decided to bring Britney up in the public spotlight to ensure that she’d constantly spend the rest of her craving approval from strangers – or when she let Britney Spears’ first video involve schoolgirl uniforms and creepy allusions to sexual violence – but when she got her bra out in a music magazine. Sounds fair.

Anyway, none of that matters any more because, as we all saw at the MTV VMAs on Sunday night, Britney Spears is absolutely back, completely well and as clear-headed and normal as you could ever wish to be. We know this for a fact because she didn’t have lipstick smeared all over her face and wasn’t arbitrarily lunging at children and making them cry.

Lynne Spears must be kicking herself about that, because now Through The Storm looks like an uplifting story about courage in the face of adversity, and we hear she was really going for the whole ‘ghoulish car-crashy exploitative last shot at fame’ demographic. Shame.

If hecklerspray’s mother’s only chance at a decent pension was to write a tell-all book about raising us to adulthood, there’d probably be an entire chapter dedicated to the time an iguana latched onto our nethers during a Caribbean camping trip, and kept its jaw firmly locked all the way back to the mainland.

It got us in an outhouse. We should have brought a flashlight.

Also there’d be a chapter about how that reptile-hanger-onner had us tied up in Customs for a day and a half. If this book actually happens, don’t anybody read it. We’d simply die.

When Britney Spears gets a tell-all book penned by her mother, it doesn’t get to have any lizard encounters included unless its about dancing with them in those new fangled southern churches. What it does get, however, is vivid accounts of Brit-Brit drinking at 13, drugging at 15, and watching her virginity sail over the horizon on the guardrail of a decrepit family tree house.

The tree house bit is probably not an actual excerpt.

Britney Spears and her mother Lynne have long had an apparent poor relationship. They tried to kill each once other or something, and we heard they had a full-on tug of war with Jamie Lynn’s recent umbilical cord.

The baby was still attached to it. So was Jamie Lynn. We heard it was very slippery, and in the end everyone laughed and had a good time.

If that is true at all you can read about it in Mother Spears upcoming book Through The Storm, which we heard is written in the spirit of Tom Clancy and an updated William Shakespeare. We’re waiting for it in paperback. If you read it don’t spoil it.

The Sun talks about the tome’s content:

“Wild child Britney allegedly first hit the bottle after joining Disney’s squeaky-clean Mickey Mouse Club. Mum LYNNE claims 14-year-old Britney then had sex with an 18-year-old high school footballer soon after she quit the TV show. And she had her first taste of drugs at 15 when she went to Los Angeles to record her debut album Baby One More Time. The sensational revelations were leaked last night ahead of publication of Lynne’s memoir, titled Through the Storm.”

Well a mother telling all of her troubled daughter’s most intimate secrets sounds OK to us, but if there is so much as a sentence of Britney shaving Federline‘s corn-rowed back we’re gonna report it to some sort of ethics committee.

The book was supposed to come out a little while back, but it got postponed after Lynne Spears’ other daughter, who we think is named Rosebud or something, got knocked up by the teenage love of her life. Hopefully all that will be included in the sequel.

We’ve heard film rights have been acquired by Steven Spielberg, and the Nolan brothers are hammering out the script to give it that crazy Dark Knight appeal. As those two prefer to work with people they know, Christian Bale will be playing the part of Lynne Spears – and spot on too, no doubt.

So Britney Spears is locked away in a psychiatric hospital and Britney's Dad is officially her conservator – that's everything all cleaned up, right?

Oh goodness, no. Haven't you people learnt that this Britney Spears malarkey is going to go on forever yet? Forever. Mark these weary words.

Anyway, the new piece of Britney Spears nonsense is that Britney's mother Lynne Spears claims that Britney's manager Sam Lutfi used to grind up drugs and mash them into Britney Spears' food. Plus he hid her dog once, the big bloody bastard.

It looks like we'll just have to face it – even though Britney Spears is going to spend the next week and a half secluded to the point of being strapped to her bed in a padded room, it's not going to stop people from hitting us over the head with stories about her again and again until she's released and can go back to sobbing on pavements in front of photographers where she belongs.

But despite all this, occasionally the odd interesting Britney Spears story leaks out. No, we're not talking about Britney's Dad getting legal conservatorship of her estate – that's literally about as boring as things can get – we're talking about Britney's manager Sam Lutfi grinding up drugs and sprinkling them all over Britney Spears' food.

That's what Britney Spears' mother Lynne Spears claimed in a restraining order she's taking out against Lutfi, anyway. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Britney Spears' friend and manager exerted near-total control over the singer, cutting her phone lines, taking away her cellphone chargers, disabling her vehicles and grinding up pills to place in her food, Spears' mother alleges in a restraining order she sought against the man. Sam Lutfi also allowed paparazzi to parade through the singer's kitchen and hid Spears' dog from her, Lynne Spears alleges. Lynne Spears said Lutfi told her, "You'd better learn that I control everything."

Sounds shocking, we know – especially when you remember that Sam Lutfi once allegedly advised a friend on the best way to commit suicide – but let's be sensible for a moment. There's a chance that Lutfi was acting out of desperation, because the drugs he was apparently grinding up were Britney's anti-psychotic pills rather than, say, fist-sized balls of heroin doused in sizzurp.

Having said that, Sam Lutfi is also accused of hiding Britney Spears' dog, and that's a crime worse than murder. If you hide Britney's dog you leave her with nothing to clutch when she has a disturbing sobbing roadside meltdown in front of the world's media. Leave her arms free during these episodes and Britney will try to gouge her eyes out or jab forks into plug sockets or pick her bum and smell it. Sam Lutfi should know better than that.

But at least Lynne Spears' restraining order was successful – Sam Lutfi can't go within 250 yards of Britney Spears any more. And he was undoubtedly the cause of Britney's downward spiral – it certainly didn't have anything to do with Lynne Spears herself. She's a great mother. She even wrote a book about what a great mother she is.

Seriously, ask anyone and they'll tell you what a good mother Lynne Spears is. Not her daughters, though – one's locked up in a nuthouse and the other one's too busy being a pregnant schoolgirl to reply. But anyone else.

Read more:

Britney Spears' mom says manager controlled the singer – LA Times 

As the popular movie Juno has taught us, nothing aids the pregnant schoolgirl like a full-on rendition of a Moldy Peaches song with the kid from Arrested Development.

However, if you're Jamie Lynn Spears then you don't need any of that twee indie schmindie nonsense – you just pump the baby out, hand it to your mother and get on with your life.

That's right, it's been reported that Jamie Lynn Spears has decided to let her mother Lynne take care of raising the unborn baby that's currently inside her. Because, you know, she did such a great job with Britney and Jamie Lynn, right?

Suddenly becoming a pregnant 16-year-old has been hard on Jamie Lynn Spears. Sure, it meant that people started watching Zoey 101, but only so they could shout "SLUT!" and "PROSTITUTE!" and "YE FOUL GODLESS WHORESON-LADEN HARLOT!" at her two-dimensional face while beating their television sets with rudimentary clubs with pure righteous christian anger.

And, tragically, the pregnancy has also meant that Jamie Lynn Spears has split up with that older guy who knocked her up, assuming with the father. And, worse, Jamie Lynn Spears has had to watch her older sister Britney compete for attention like a pissy toddler who keeps shutting herself topless in her bathroom shrieking in a British accent until they take her away in an ambulance.

That's all been too much to take for Jamie Lynn Spears, which is why reports are suggesting that she doesn't even want the baby any more and will just fob it off to her mother Lynne as soon as it pops out. A source told Star magazine:

"After several weeks of personal soul searching and talks and discussions with her mom, Jamie Lynn reluctantly agreed that giving up the baby is the right thing to do. Lynne says Jamie doesn't understand the lifelong consequences of having a baby. She wants Jamie Lynn to continue her show business career after the baby is born and Jamie Lynn also realises she wants to enjoy her teenage years without the responsibilities of caring for a baby. Jamie Lynn will be back at work and trying to remind people of her talent and not that she is an unwed teenage mother."

Good. Jamie Lynn Spears needs to focus on her acting career, because that's obviously much more important than being a mother. Any old idiot can thwump out a baby, but can they star in a possibly-cancelled teen sitcom on a comparatively-unwatched cable station? No, they cannot. The possibly-cancelled teen sitcom is Jamie Lynn Spears' gift to the world, and we shouldn't forget that.

But, still, giving the baby to Lynne Spears to raise? That seems a little bit shortsighted. Here's a handily-prepared analogy to explain things further…

Imagine if some girls come to your door and offer to sell you some cookies. You ask to see the cookies first and the girls pull out one cookie that's got pregnant even though it's still a child and another cookie that's bald, has a visibly-exposed vagina and is so batshit insane that the girls sometimes have to slap it to keep it quiet. Would you buy cookies from those girls, or would you buy cookies from someone who's managed to raise two cookies that aren't blisteringly dysfunctional?

That's all we're saying.

Read more:

Jamie Lynn Spears' baby sacrifice – Femalefirst 

As humans, it's only natural that we look at Britney Spears from time to time and think "Golly, someone really did a bang-up job of raising that little delight to be a well-rounded and conscientious member of society."

However, our feeling of admiration at the exemplary way that Britney Spears was raised into the angel she is today is often tempered with a deep burning resentment at the fact that, no matter what we do, we'll never be able to bring up our children to be anywhere near the glowing standard of saintly humanity that Britney Spears has set. So we can't believe our luck that Britney Spears' mother Lynne Spears is all set to publish Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World next year. It's basically a how-to manual for anyone who wants to raise their kids to be just like Britney Spears. We're especially looking forward to the chapter about pushing your young child relentlessly through the machinations of fame at the obvious cost of her mental safety.

No, wait, that's the whole book. Our mistake.

No matter what Britney Spears may have been through over the last few years, like letting a redneck fill her up with accidental babies or divorcing the redneck or squabbling over the babies in public so that everyone knows how addicted to drugs she is, she's always had the love of her mother Lynne Spears. Admittedly it's a strange love that involves hoiking young Britney Spears around all kinds of talent agencies when she should have been enjoying her childhood, encouraging her to dress as a fetishised schoolgirl ideal and sing about liking domestic violence as a teenager and then selling Britney Spears' secrets to magazines as soon as things started going south, but it still sort of counts as a form of love. We think.

And it's completely reciprocated too – Britney Spears loves Lynne Spears enough to serve her legal papers and then slap her right in her face – a sign of affection in the Baptist states of America equalled only by filling up a loved one's duvet with venomous snakes and then firebombing their house. They do things different there. We shouldn't judge.

Anyway, lord knows that the only thing we want in this world is to ruthlessly drag our children through the lower rungs of the entertainment industry until they make it big so we can live vicariously through the success and inevitable dangerous instability that follows. But we just didn't know how to bring up our children to ensure that they'd try and kill themselves in a rehab facility by their mid-twenties – until now. According to E! Online, Lynne Spears is all set to write a parenting guide based on her experiences with Britney Spears:

Lynne Spears has inked a deal to pen a memoir focusing on her role as showbiz family matriarch, Curt Harding, a spokesman for the Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., told E! News Friday. Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World has been marked for a May 11, 2008—Mother's Day—release. Harding said that he has not yet seen a manuscript so he can't say how deeply the book will delve into the Spears' private lives or, more important, whether Lynne's viewpoint will encompass the current state of her daughter's career and high-profile lifestyle, both of which are obviously attracting a different caliber of headlines than they were a few years ago.

There aren't enough words in the English language to describe how much we want Lynne Spears' parenting guide to be a success, because of the satisfaction she'll feel in 20 years when she looks around the world at all the young men and women smashing up cars with umbrellas and getting their vaginas out and knowing that, in some small way, she made it all happen. Plus we'd like Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World by Lynne Spears to succeed because it'd open the door for more celebrity self-help guides to be written. And, let's face it, if people are willing to spend money on Lynne Spears' parenting guide, then they'd go crazy for the Amy Winehouse guide to clean and sensible living.

Read more:

Britney's Mom To Dish On Spears Family Values – E! Online