Shania Twain Tries to Join TMI Memoir Club—Do Her Revelations Make the Cut?

Singer releases memoir about her painful breakup and her shocking struggles with her family

By Marianne Garvey May 03, 2011 6:55 PMTags
Shania Twain, From This Moment OnAtria Publishing

Shania Twain's been to hell and back.

There was the poverty-stricken childhood, the death of her parents, her ex-husband leaving her for her best friend.

Now the country star is going into detail about these struggles in her new autobiography, From This Moment On, revealing enough personal shockers to make anyone wonder how she managed to survive it all…

• Twain's hubby of 14 years, Mutt Lange, left the singer for her best friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud in 2008. The now-happily remarried Twain, who bonded with and then wed her ex-BFF's ex-husband Frédéric Thiébaud, says she cried constantly, took five baths a day and even called her ex bestie the c-word.

"It was kind of cathartic," she writes. "Harsh, I know, but after all, it is only a word. My emotions were so balled-up inside me that it felt good to release."

• Twain also discusses her self-consciousness over her appearance and aging, writing that she had a bad self-image following the split.

"I'll be honest: when your husband leaves you, and falls into the arms of your close friend, your self esteem can really suffer," she writes.

• Twain says she was both physically and emotionally abused by her mother's husband, who also abused her mother. Twain details one incident in which she watched him repeatedly push her mother's head into a toilet, as well as describes a fight of her own with him when she was just 11 years old.

"I ran up behind my dad with a chair in both hands and smashed it across his back," she writes. "Before I could get away, he punched me in the jaw. Adrenaline pumping, I punched him back!"

• Twain says that her stepfather also sexually abused her, harassing her while she was in bed by murmuring obscenities and fondling her once when she was a teenager.

• Then there was the poverty. After begging her mother to run away to a shelter in Toronto, they suffered financially, eating nothing but mushed bread and wearing the bread bags over her feet when there was no money for new shoes.

And that's just some of the drama contained in the book. Twain said she experienced an "urgency" to document her life in an "honest and complete" way.

Mission accomplished.