Music: {allcanada} Shania details heartbreak in book

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

{allcanada} Shania details heartbreak in book

Shania Twain says she isn't running away any more. And it feels good.

Scary, but good.

The notoriously private 45-year-old Canadian country-pop superstar finally lays ALL the horrible hardships of her life bare -- previously just known in broad strokes as a rags-to-riches story -- in her new memoirs, From This Moment On.

It's all there in heavy detail, starting with her early childhood in Timmins, Ont.: Poverty (not enough food or clothes, maggots under the carpet); parental neglect (she frequently didn't bathe or brush her teeth); domestic abuse (her step-father against her mother); verbal and sexual abuse (her step-father and an elderly landlord against her).

"It's scary, it took a lot," said an unusually forthcoming Twain, decked out in a peach-coloured top and matching jeans, and purple high heels in a Toronto hotel room Tuesday afternoon. About 1,000 people had turned out for a book signing the night before.

"These last few years have been the most vulnerable of my life. But there was no other way because I would have ran away from it forever. I would have. It's been too many years. I'm 45 years old. I would have given up singing for sure.

"It's definitely easier to dig than it is to climb. I would have certainly just said, 'I'll just squash the sadness that it means,' and I will just do something else. (But) why would I not want to do something which I really love, which is music?"

The book also details Twain's devastating heartbreak as a young adult and later as a wife and mother.

Her parents were both killed when she was 22 and she had to provide for her three younger siblings living in a rented house with no running water or electricity near Deerhurst Resort, in Huntsville, Ont., where she was performing, before moving to Nashville and beginning her career.

That was followed by major betrayal just three years ago when her 14-year marriage to South African producer and songwriting partner Mutt Lange fell apart after he had an affair with her supposed best friend Marie-Anne in their adopted home of Switzerland.

Lange and Twain have a nine-year-old son, Eja, together and, although "beautifully twisted," as she told Oprah recently, she married Marie-Anne's ex, Fred Thiebaud, in a New Year's Day ceremony this year.

One major outcome of running away from "the sadness" all these years, has meant the loss of Twain's singing voice -- a medical condition known as Dysphonia -- for which she's about to undergo intensive physio and speech therapy.

Some reports have suggested it was a result of her divorce from Lange, but she said the split "only magnified and intensified something that was already there.

"Singing my own demos ,it's really painful to listen to myself sing a lot of the time right now," said Twain, who has sold 75 million albums. "Dysphonia. for me, is directly related to expression. So the lack of being able to communicate what I'm thinking, the lack of feeling like I was able to complain from being a very young child."

Twain is even optimistic she might have a long-awaited new album out within a year or so after penning her first song without Lange, which was documented on her six-episode OWN Network series Why Not? with Shania Twain, debuting Friday in Canada.

The tune is called Today is Your Day and will be released when the last episode airs.

"I've written many years before I met Mutt, but since my marriage you see, so that was a whole liberating experience of independence."