To this day, Shania Twain is still the best-selling female artist in country music history, with three consecutive Diamond-certified albums and over 100 million records sold worldwide. However, her life story is not without its trials, which may surprise you if you haven’t cracked open her 2011 memoir, From This Moment On. From the outside, Twain seems like any other performer, glittery and colorful, focused on making her audience forget about their problems for the night. But underneath that layer of sparkle is one of grit that comes only with certain life experiences.
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Shania Twain signed her first major record deal in 1991 when she was 26, but just a few years before that, Twain would have to deal with an unexpected loss. When she was 22, her mother and stepfather would die in a car accident.
In the past, Shania has spoken openly about the abuse she and her mother experienced under her stepfather, Jerry Twain. But even so, she told People that the accident still left her “in shock.”
“I lost a very important foundation. As rickety as it was, it was still a foundation,” she explained. “My whole life history was there with them, and many of the associations fell along the way, away, after my parents died. It was so true that so much of my life was stemming from them being in my life — the good and the bad.”
In the years that followed, Shania would take on the role of the caregiver for her younger siblings, putting her dreams of becoming a star on pause.
How Shania’s Past Helped Give Her Perspective
Even after years of recognition and success, Twain would tell The Guardian that she wasn’t totally immune to heartbreak, as she would discover when she found out her husband, “Mutt” Lange, was having an affair.
“I started peeling back the layers of pain I was in and all the other griefs and disappointments and challenges came to the surface,” she explained to the outlet.
Twain and Lange were married in 1993 and would collaborate on many of her major hits. Together, they wrote and produced songs like “Man, I Feel Like A Woman!”, “You’re Still The One”, and countless others from her catalog. In 2008, Twain would discover that her husband was cheating on her with her close friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
She told The Guardian, “I thought, ‘I’ve been through worse and it’s time to put it all into perspective.’ When my parents died, I experienced a much deeper grief than even the betrayal. I was just out of myself. When you add shock to grief, it does crazy things to your mind. And that really helped me through – this was not nearly as bad as my parents dying.”
As it turned out, the pain from her past was able to give her the gift of perspective. “I survived that,” she shared, “And I don’t want to give this so much credit.”
Photo by: Justin Goff Photos for cd:uk/Getty Images
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