In many ways the public could be perceived as having destroyed her just to raise her up again-something they've done in various ways to artists like Courtney Love, Madonna, and the late Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse.
It was a sharp turn that felt to me as if people didn't really care about Spears: They just wanted to watch her life play out like a movie. A cleaned-up appearance at the 2008 VMAs and new album, Circus, rehabilitated her image, and the same gossip sites that were hungry for her failure seven months prior were now her biggest champions.
This is more or less an exaggerated version of what happened to Spears.
