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.