peever wrote:

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IS THERE ANY WAY TO ORDER AN AUDIO VERSION ONLINE, AND LISTEN TO IT ONLINE? LIKE a ebook

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 Looks like there's only an abridged Audio CD.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Moment-Shania-Twain/dp/1451620748/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1304220966&sr=8-3

Shania Twain: 'I Had Moments of Sheer Desperation'

Shania Twain has inspired her fans over the years through her gifted songwriting, her story of survival after her mother and stepfather were tragically killed in a car accident, and more recently, her strength after her painful, public divorce and subsequent marriage to friend Frederic Thiebaud.

In her revealing new memoir, From This Moment On, the 45-year-old star takes readers through the events that have made her who she is. In the excerpts below, Twain opens up about the impact of her mother and stepfather's abusive marriage and the devastation of her husband, rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange's affair.

On the devastating discovery, in March 2008, that her husband of 14 years was having an affair with her friend and confidante, Marie-Anne.
Twain describes it as "the most shocking and painful truth of my life since the death of my parents twenty years earlier....For the first week after finding out about the affair, I was ready to die--to go to bed forever and never wake up. Or to hurt someone. I was ready to do something desperate, but in reality, there was nothing to do but to suffer through it. Fortunately, when you're a mom, the responsibility of caring for your child can keep you going.

"Denial can have multiple layers, and rationalizing is common when you're trying to absorb something you just don't want to believe. I thought: Okay, so maybe they made a mistake. My husband and my friend will come to their senses and realize that. I was ready to forgive, and forget, make things right , move on, and get on with our lives. Not like nothing had happened, but like something had happened that I thought was fixable. But his was not to be.

"Despite everything, I still loved my husband. And I still loved my friend. I put myself in their shoes with the understanding that accidents happen, we're all human, and we all make mistakes....Eventually, I came to the point of accepting the end of my marriage."

See photos of Shania Twain Through the Years

How she came to fall in love with Frederic Thiebaud, the ex-husband of the friend who betrayed her.
"I describe what happened to Fred and me this way: we were two people who had been jettisoned from our lives as if we'd been shoved off the edge of a high cliff. Thankfully, we managed to grab onto each other on the way down in midair, and break each other's fall.

"I spent months shutting myself off from any thoughts of a relationship, but Fred loved me and was brave enough to come out and say it, even though I had made it clear that the thought of ever being in love again scared me out of my wits....It's true I swore I would never allow myself to love again, but Fred is impossible not to love.

"Three years after our hearts were broken, together, I feel more love now than any other emotion I've felt since that time. I consider myself the luckiest woman on the planet that I have Fred to share the rest of my life with."

Photos: Stars Who Got a Second Chance at Love

Twain also describes the intense domestic violence and spousal abuse she witnessed as a child. In the book, she recalls one particular fight between her stepfather and mother.
"My mother was a featherweight and so easy to push around. Jerry had her on the bathroom floor by the toilet, and, grabbing her hair, he slammed her head against the side of the basin, knocking her out cold. I could see Jerry repeatedly plunge my mother's head into the toilet bowl, then pull it out again. I remember wondering, 'Why is he trying to drown her when she's already dead?' I wanted to scream, 'Stop, you already killed her!' I wanted to stop him, but I was too afraid...The enormity of that helplessness transferred to me, and I felt as limp as she was."

Despite the violence, Twain says she felt "sorry" for her parents, and while she hated the violence, she "didn't hate them."
"The guilt and shame they clearly felt after each incident, I sensed, weighed a ton; knowing us kids were watching must have been awful. I felt sorry for their shame and didn't have the heart to hold it against them even at that very young age. Each time, I just wanted it to be over, behind us and forgotten."

Twain rose to fame in the early 1990s with her debut album. She describes the difficulty in dealing with her newfound celebrity, loss of privacy, and pressure to live up to the public's expectations.
"I had moments of sheer desperation over these years, and although I never contemplated suicide, I was looking for an escape. I wished for an illness that might force me in the hospital so I could rest, or for the album suddenly to lose steam to it would be time to get off the road and pass my hours with my guitar just writing in peace with a few friends around a fire."


From This Moment On is available May 3, 2011. Shania Twain will appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Tuesday, May 3. Her docu-series on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network will debut on May 8.

Loonie Echo wrote:

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Wow! I had no idea that Jerry was so violent. Shocking! I admire Shania even more for surviving this!

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Neither did I. Having witnessed what domestic violence can do, this may have been an influence in her decision to write Black Eyes, Blue Tears for her Come On Over album.

Shania Twain details family abuse and painful divorce in new memoir

• Twain says her family was physically and emotionally abused for years by Jerry Twain, her mother’s husband. (Twain is estranged from her biological father.) In one chilling passage, Twain recalls watching Jerry plunge her mother’s head into the toilet repeatedly after knocking her out cold. Years later, 11-year-old Shania (then called Eilleen) would summon the courage to fight back against her father. “I ran up behind my dad with a chair in both hands and smashed it across his back… Before I could get away, he punched me in the jaw. Adrenaline pumping, I punched him back!”
• Twain also says she was sexually abused by Jerry, who muttered obscene slurs at her while she was in bed and once fondled her when she was a teenager. She eventually convinced her mother to run away with the family to a shelter in Toronto.
•  Living in poverty in rural Canada often forced the family to make do with little. Twain recalls days on end when the family had nothing to eat but “goulash”: dry bread with boiled milk and brown sugar. She also mentions wearing bread bags on her feet when her family couldn’t afford proper boots for keeping warm in the winter.
• Twain says she was devastated when her husband, Mutt Lange, left her for Marie-Anne Thiébaud in 2008. “I’ll be honest: when your husband leaves you, and falls into the arms of your close friend, your self-esteem can really suffer.”
• Twain begged Marie-Anne Thiébaud to leave Lange in an email: “I don’t want life or love anymore… Why are you torturing me? Let it go. Pleeeeeaaaaaaasssseee!!!!!”
• During the split, Twain cried constantly and took five baths a day. At one point, she helped herself recover from the pain of the split by allowing herself to call Marie-Anne Thiébaud an female anatomical epithet . “It was kind of cathartic. (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.”
• Now 45 and remarried to Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, Twain deals with constant anxiety about her appearance and the effects of age. “I’m pretty insecure about my changing body… I’m letting ‘the girls’ hang loose under my sweat clothes around the house and when someone comes to the door, I cross my arms under them for support."

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/05/03/shania-twain-abuse/

PurplePeopleEater wrote:

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I found it interesting in the Oprah show today they blurred Mary Anne and Mutt's faces but had a clear photos of Eja.

-- Edited by PurplePeopleEater on Tuesday 3rd of May 2011 05:50:45 PM

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 I'm sure because they didn't give permission to use them.

First of all, Marie-Ann is the one brought this on herself along with Mutt.  Shania's new husband is not the one cheated and lying to her face over, over, and over again and breaking up two families.  Shania was not the one who left the marriage.  I think it was so beautiful how Shania and Fred came together and its as Shania would put it, "beautifully twisted."  If you read the book, you will what I am talking about.   

There is no excuse for any kind of violence at all.  Shania has forgiven Jerry and will always will think of him as her father.  Shania does mention her bio father in the book. You'll have to read the book. 

-- Edited by candy-field on Wednesday 4th of May 2011 07:15:05 PM

Book Review: From This Moment On by Shania Twain

By John Valeri

Today, Hartford Books Examiner reviews From This Moment On (Atria Books, $26.99) by Shania Twain.

A five-time Grammy Award Winner, Twain has sold 75 million albums worldwide, and her 1997 disc, Come on Over, is both the bestselling album of all time by a female artist and the bestselling country album of all time.  Yet despite the level of fame that comes with that kind of success, the notoriously private singer/songwriter has managed to remain very much a mystery.

From This Moment On, however, is an unflinching look at the aspects of Twain’s life that have been largely kept under wraps—including the traumatic events that have manifested themselves physically with the loss of her singing voice.

Twain was born into poverty in rural Canada—a plight that she and her four siblings endured throughout childhood.  The economic strain caused great stress in the household, resulting in the family’s frequent relocation and domestic violence in the home.  Twain’s step-father, Jerry (who Twain considers to be her real father)—generally a kind-hearted, humorous and selfless person—frequently beat her mother, Sharon.  (At the age of 14, Twain would convince her mother, who suffered from depression, to move the family to a battered woman’s shelter—though Sharon and her youngest children would ultimately return home to her husband.)  Those memories still haunt Twain.

Due largely in part to the hardships of poverty and abuse, Twain embraced music as a form of expression, as well as a possible means to make money.  Her motives were never to become rich and famous—occurrences that would plague her later in life—but rather to earn just enough so that she could support her family.  Music was just as much her mother’s dream for her as it was her own, and Sharon arranged for performances in bars, senior centers, and other venues throughout Canada—a commitment that proved to be yet another stressor on the family.  (Career momentum would initially prove elusive, and Twain worked at McDonald’s as well as undertaking the physically laborious job of acting as foreman of a dozen-man reforestation crew.)

Twain’s parents were killed in a tragic vehicle accident in 1987, and the then 22 year-old suddenly found herself the primary caregiver for her three younger siblings.  She accepted a job performing at Ontario’s Deerhurst Resort to support the family—a job she kept until Nashville came calling.

After moving to the country music capital, Twain was met with resistance by her record label, and her self-titled debut would contain only one of her original compositions.  The album underwhelmed, leaving her singing career in a state of limbo.  Enter Robert John “Mutt” Lang.  The reclusive rock producer and Twain’s musical collaboration would turn personal, and the two would soon marry.  Further, they would go on to make musical history with three record-shattering albums—The Woman in Me (1995), Come on Over (1997) and Up! (2002).

Twain would struggle with both the fame and fortune that resulted from hit records, sold-out tours, and media saturation, and she and Mutt (who had a child, Eja, in 2001) would ultimately leave the United States and settle into a life of relative solitude in Lake Geneva, Switzerland.  Marital discord persisted, however, and Twain discovered that her husband was having an affair with her best friend and confidante in 2008.  That moment would prove to be the breaking point in a life of pent up sorrows.  

While Twain has found her happy ending—an unexpected love story complete with its own book-worthy twist— it came only after she fell into a state of absolute despair.  To see this strong, self-sufficient woman resort to begging for her husband back—Twain includes emails that she sent to her husband’s mistress after learning of the infidelity—is heartbreaking proof of her emotional state.  That she feels the confidence to share something so raw and personal is a testament to her strength of spirit.  

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Twain’s autobiography (which was written with the intent of serving as a historical record for her son) is a painfully honest recollection that exposes her deepest vulnerabilities to a worldwide audience.  While the highest of highs are often only mentioned in passing, it’s the lowest of lows that the ever-humble Twain explores intimately, probing for the lessons learned.  And while that process may have been a painful one, it also seems to have been cathartic.  Her introspection, while self-empowering, will also inspire readers, many of whom will relate to Twain’s struggles and insecurities.  In the end, her story reminds us that one of life’s most precious gifts is the perspective that comes with time.

From This Moment On reaffirms what Shania Twain’s family, friends, and fans have known all along: She’s not just a pretty face…

http://www.examiner.com/books-in-hartford/book-review-from-this-moment-on-by-shania-twain-review

I read this and thought it was like something straight from a Danielle Steel novel. Heartbreaking and romantic all at the same time. I thought that this deserved a thread of its own but feel free to move it.

Shania Twain opens up about her husband's affair

In her moving memoir, From This Moment On, Twain reveals how her husband's infidelity devastated her and how she moved on. Here is an excerpt.

By Shania Twain Thu May 05 2011

Upon our return to Switzerland at the end of March 2008, I would face the most painful shock of my life since the death of my parents 20 years earlier. My husband was having an affair with Marie-Anne. Marie-Anne my confidante, the same friend who’d comforted me over the phone only weeks before, expressing how absurd it was of me to have any such suspicions of my husband. The idea that she was the mistress, after all the confiding I’d done in her, had not even entered my mind.

Denial can have multiple layers, and rationalizing is common when you’re trying to absorb something you just don’t want to believe. I thought: Okay, so maybe they made a mistake. My husband and my friend will come to their senses and realize that. I was ready to forgive, forget, make things right, move on, and get on with our lives. Not like nothing had happened, but like something had happened that I thought was fixable. But this was not to be. Because despite everything, I still loved my husband. And I still loved my friend. I put myself in their shoes with the understanding that accidents happen, we’re all human and we all make mistakes. It was love that allowed me to take that perspective at that moment, but considering my desperation to keep everything from falling apart, it was probably also in my naïve (and shell-shocked) state of mind that I wrote the following letter to Marie-Anne, treating her as a decent friend who’d temporarily lost her way and behaved in a manner that wasn’t really her. I just wanted everyone to get on with healing, including her:

Regardless of what has and hasn’t been said and done up to now, and that things have been changed forever for all of us, I do hope we all go into the future never having secrets from each other ever, ever again of any kind. That we take responsibility to make sure the ones we love can know they can trust us and never do things they cannot know about...

For the first week after finding out about the affair, I was ready to die—to go to bed forever and never wake up. Or to hurt someone. I was ready to do something desperate, but in reality, there was nothing to do but to suffer through it. Fortunately, when you’re a mom, the responsibility of caring for your child can keep you going. You have the routine of preparing your child for school in the morning, dragging yourself out of bed on autopilot and cheerfully keeping a brave face. And as soon as they’re off, at least in my case, I slipped back into my pajamas and spent the day in bed, crying and sleeping fitfully. I wasn’t eating at all; in fact, I went a whole week without any solid food and just drank orange juice. This can be considered healthy during a cleansing fast, for example, but I wouldn’t recommend it while trying to cope with the grief of a deep emotional crisis.

I was freezing cold all the time, and my only relief came when I’d strip off my clothes and climb a steaming hot bath. Five times a day. Yet I’d be shivering most of the time, shaking uncontrollably, my teeth chattering violently. Out of the bath, I’d wear a winter coat over my pajamas, plus wool socks and a scarf. It made no difference. I couldn’t get rid of the chills, and at the same time, I was sweating profusely. It was as if my body were trying to purge itself of the emotional agony inside by forcing the pain out of my pores so that I didn’t drown in it. I hurt physically, too, aching as though someone had sandpapered all my nerve endings. But when four o’clock arrived, and it was time to kick back into Mommy the Brave for the evening, I was there for my son with a hug and a smile. Believe me, it took all the courage I could muster to get through our morning and afternoon routines like everything was “okay.” However, the way I looked at it, this sudden, major change in our lives was going to be hard enough on him; I was not about to subject him to the pain that I was feeling on top of his own.

All things considered, I think I did a pretty good job of managing this “double life,” as my son didn’t seem unusually stressed. I resented Marie-Anne a great deal, knowing which end of the stick she was on. We were both new, single moms, going through our daily routines with our children, only I was drained of all my energy, as the façade I tried to keep up for my child’s sake took everything I had. She was going through her daily routine, however, while in a new and exciting romance with a man who decided to put her first, above his wife and his family. Love is energizing, and new love is especially blissful and makes you feel invincible. Boy, were she and I at opposite ends of the stick, all right. It must have felt so empowering to know that he risked it all for her.

Is this the way a mistress feels? That she is more valuable and important to the man than his wife and family? Perhaps it’s the unfaithful husband convincing her that she’s important enough to stake such a claim. Or is it her own sense of self-entitlement? In any case, at the time my perception was that my husband’s mistress was the winner, the one defended by my own husband. And when he wasn’t looking, she had the confidence to parade her ****iness and fearlessness with snarly looks and hisses when by chance our paths crossed in person, as they inevitably did, since we lived in the same small village.

This was extremely painful for me and left me feeling weak and defeated. She had nothing left to fear, and I’d lost. Every time she kicked me when I was down, she made sure Mutt wasn’t looking, and when I tried to explain to him what he couldn’t see, he refused to listen and didn’t want to know. I felt like I was trapped in some kind of childish game with my sadistic opponent standing just far enough away that I couldn’t reach her, all the while sticking out her tongue at me. It was degrading. I hated her because I felt she was making a fool of my husband, someone I considered to be intelligent, mature, and anything but vulnerable to the cliché of the temptress secretary, as she shamelessly “displayed” an attitude that seemed to say, “Mutt will never see my other face, and I will never show it to him, because I have his compassion, his sympathy and his credit card, and there is nothing you can do about it.” She was right, and I felt helpless for myself and for Mutt. I was disgusted that another woman’s lust for a lifestyle upgrade was worth the devastation of my family. She was pitiless, and I was a pitiful mess of “woe is me.”

Although I had known Frédéric for about nine years, I had never really known him; I mean, he was my close friend’s husband. I thought he was a wonderful, considerate person, and anyone could see that he was an attentive husband and father, but we were friends by association only. It was he and Mutt who were friends, meeting over dinners to discuss politics, sports, current events, and life in general. I always believed it’s one thing to be close to your friend, but another to be closer to your friend’s husband. The men had their bond, and Marie-Anne and I had ours. That is at least what I believed, of course. Fred was always the one to take the kids on Saturday mornings for bike rides or to the carnival passing through town. He loved being with the kids, and I admired his energy and dedication to his daughter. He would take Johanna on father-daughter vacations to give Marie-Anne time to herself, and his bond with my own son from the very beginning was also very touching. The two of them were always the best of friends, and both Mutt and I were happy that Eja had another male figure in his life, as the Thiébauds were the only friends we had in the country.

We all spent time together, but the kids gravitated toward Fred. He and I shared much of our family lives together, but in our appropriate places as the spouses of our friends. It stands to reason that we supported each other during this time of our mutual betrayal, staying in touch, mostly by phone and email every couple of days, as I’d left for Canada at this point. After all, who else could understand better what the other was going through? However, since our previous interactions had always been in the context of our two families, we almost didn’t know how to act with each other directly. We were polite, almost formal. Fred is especially gentle and traditional when it comes to social boundaries, always very friendly but appropriate. For both Mutt and me, teaching our son good manners has always been very important. Mutt reminds Eja often that “manners maketh man,” and I believe this is true. I also believe there is another layer to this philosophy that is equally important, if not more so: honesty maketh humanity. Fred is someone who possesses both manners and honesty with a natural ease. Raised in a family of doctors and lawyers on both his mother’s and his father’s side, Fred grew up in a formal, refined social environment—a privileged upbringing. Considering the comfort and stability growing up almost sheltered from social and economic struggle, Fred is still a real salt-of-the-earth kind of person. An open book, and deep in his natural being, he is a genuine and sincere human being. Together Fred and I tried to hash out what had happened to each of us.

Sometimes we argued over who was to blame for this disaster. “He” must have done this. No, “she” must have done that. We didn’t want any of it to be true and simply didn’t know who was responsible. I didn’t want it to be my husband any more than he wanted it to be his wife, and neither of us wanted to believe our friend would do such a thing. There were so many angles and tangles to the long web of lies and deception, it was enough to make you dizzy. Nearly six months later, in September 2009, I returned to Switzerland from the cottage in Canada so that Eja could go back to school. Fred and I continued bonding over our lives, our children, our woes, our dreams, our recovery. It was fall and getting cooler, and we would often have evening campfires outside the front door of the annex, as the main house was still under renovation. Roasting marshmallows, playing music, dancing, and singing—we had so much fun, and Fred and I were getting very good at swing dancing. The kids would join in and sometimes stand on the side to cheer us on. One night in December they were both up on the second-floor bedroom balcony watching us with a bird’s-eye view, while Fred and I danced below beside the campfire, unaware of their gazing down on us. Fred and I must have appeared to be pretty lost in each other because at one point the kids piped up and said, “Why don’t you guys kiss?” Fred and I stopped dead, stunned, and said in unison, “What?” “Why don’t you guys just kiss?” they repeated, rolling their eyes while smiling from ear to ear. We looked at each other, quite surprised that the kids had recognized a connection between us that we’d been feeling for some time but felt uncomfortable revealing openly. We responded to the kids with an “okay,” and we kissed on the cheek. The kids said, “No, on the lips.” Fred and I couldn’t believe our own children were cheering us on to kiss, for real, so we did. Fred and I perked our kissers, pecked on the lips, and the kids smiled and giggled. We were happy. Relief came rushing through us, as the ice had been broken. Fred and I were surprised and relieved by our children’s encouragement to be ourselves in love, and from that moment on, the four of us began to form a reassembled family, building a nest, a new foundation, reconstructing our lives as a unit after the fall of the ones we’d lost. Fred and I proceeded with caution, because we were both keenly aware that our mutual grief might be the main thing binding us together. We also considered the dangers of confusing the children with a rebound romance.

But it wasn’t. What attracted me to Fred was his selflessness. He was going through the same agony as I was—maybe even worse, because as a father, he would have to battle his soon-to-be ex for the right to see his own daughter. At least that was something I never had to face. Yet he was never too busy to nurse me through my emotional lows. I think it’s fair to say that he was more of a support to me than I was to him at first. While I was a self-pitying spigot of never-ending sadness in the initial period of my grief, he showed strength, kept a healthily clear, pragmatic perspective, and was infinitely patient and understanding. I admired him. He was also there for Eja, who had known Fred his whole life. In fact, not long ago, Fred showed me a picture taken of my son only hours after he was born. “I don’t recall ever seeing this photo before,” I said to Fred. “I don’t remember who took this photo.” “Me,” he responded. That warmed my heart. He really was always there, like a gift under the Christmas tree, pushed to the back where I couldn’t see it. A gift with my name on it, only hiding, as I wasn’t meant to open it till much later when it was time to take the tree down, then all of a sudden there it was, this present, for me! As if labeled “From heaven—to Eilleen,” Fred was for me; it was just a matter of time.

Adapted from From This Moment On, by Shania Twain. Copyright © 2011, Shania Twain. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cheating husband killed Shania's Kiwi dream
By Joanne Carroll
5:30 AM Sunday May 15, 2011

But while in New Zealand she became suspicious of her husband. "Our New Zealand trips were usually spent in three- to four-month stretches. During this stretch in New Zealand, Mutt returned to Switzerland twice, while Eja and I stayed behind.

When Twain returned to Switzerland in March 2008, she discovered her friend was having an affair with her husband. "The same friend who'd comforted me over the phone, expressing how absurd it was of me to have any such suspicions of my husband. The idea that she was the mistress... had not even entered my mind."

She married Thiebaud's husband, Frederic, in January. She said she turned to him after the break-up because he was the only person who understood.

It is not known how assets were split after the couple divorced in 2008 but Twain no longer owns the property.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/music/news/article.cfm?c_id=264&objectid=10725688

"From This Moment On" officially debuts at #5 on the New York Times best seller list (combined print & e-book nonfiction).

New York Times best sellers

Sales for the week ending May 7, 2011.

1. “Heaven Is for Real” by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

2. “Bossypants” by Tina Fey

3. “Does the Noise In My Head Bother You?” by Steven Tyler

4. “Stories I Only Tell My Friends” by Rob Lowe

5. “From This Moment On” by Shania Twain

6. “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand

7. “If You Ask Me” by Betty White

8. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot

9. “She Walks In Beauty” selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy

10. “Lone Survivor” by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-05-22/combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction/list.html

"FTMO" is #6 in hardcover nonfiction.

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-05-22/hardcover-nonfiction/list.html

Simon & Schuster added an excerpt:

Excerpt 1

Man, I feel like a woman!

BARING IT ALL: Twain and Fey

by ROXANE HUDON
and SACHA JACKSON

It’s summer, time for daiquris and celebrity memoirs. Two of the world’s most beloved famous ladies, Shania Twain and Tina Fey, recently released their biographies, so we took this oppor­tunity to see how the two matched up.

Childhood Trauma

Shania: “My mother was featherweight and so easy to push around. Jerry [her stepfather] had her on the bathroom floor by the toilet, and, grabbing her hair, he slammed her head against the side of the basin, knocking her out cold.” Yes, he beat the **** out of mom, repeatedly, including one time her mom was pregnant, but Shania doesn’t hold a grudge and blames the violence on “the economic struggle” of the time.

Tina: “During the spring semester of kindergarten, I was slashed in the face by a stranger in the alley behind my house.” That’s it, that’s all the grisly details you’ll get behind Tina’s  scar. Instead, she explains that the incident gave her an “inflated sense of self” and therefore she’s not actually talented.

Puberty

Shania: “One of the most painful memories of that period, at least as far as I was concerned, was the excruciating swelling of my breasts…even though I was only going on nine years old.” Tina’s mum handed her a first period kit with a pamphlet called “Growing Up and Liking It,” then silently slipped out of the room.

First Jobs

Shania, McDonald’s: “There were big helium tanks in the back of the store. My sister and I would suck in the gas, then get on the microphone. Customers would pull up and be greeted by what sounded like a pair of munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.”

Tina, Summer Showtime Theatre: “I took a job as the night box office manager because my 11th-grade boyfriend said we’d have fun there. He promptly broke up with me to date a hot blond dancer girl to whom he is now married.”

Gays

Shania played in a lot of Toronto gay bars. “My fascination with this initial introduction to men transforming themselves into beautiful women likely sowed the seed of inspiration for a song I would write years later: “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

After being dumped, Tina fell in with the gays at Summer Showtime. “Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I was embraced by the gays. I was so funny and mean and mature for my age!” She spent the rest of the summer palling around with her besties—two adult lesbians and a couple of gay brothers.

Body Issues

Shania Twain wears belly-revealing leopard-print suits—she has no body issues.

Fey dedicates three chapters to this topic: Reflections on Being Very, Very Skinny (“I felt wonderfully superior to everyone”); Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat (“I wore oversized men’s overalls that I loved”); and Every Girl Must Be Everything, in which she gives a laundry list of enviable traits—Caucasian blue eyes, a Jamaican dancehall ass, the abs of a lesbian gym owner—concluding that the only person close to pulling this off is Kim Kardashian. “Everyone else is struggling.”

Sexual Experiences

Shania: “I knew only a little bit…such as the fact that the first time would probably hurt. I approached the whole experience fairly level-headed, as Daniel [first boyfriend] was kind and patient, so I felt no pressure or stress from him, and my hormones weren’t driving my decision to have sex, curiosity was. Without the heat of the moment fogging my brain, there was time to plan and think every­thing through.”

Tina: “What 19-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that,  you say? None of them want that? You are correct.”

True Love

After her heartbreak with first husband Mutt, Shania found a second love, Fred, the husband of the friend who betrayed her and slept with Mutt. This love story started with typical Shania passion. “He wrapped me in a blanket since I was shivering, sat me on the office sofa in his apartment and gave me a half glass of vodka.”

Despite a college dry spell (though she did have some car make-out sessions with a dude she calls “Handsome Robert Wuhl”), Tina eventually met the man of her dreams doing improv at Sec­ond City in Chicago. “It changed the way I looked at the world and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?”

Woman in a Man’s World

Shania: “With the frustration of having to bite my tongue rather often during the onset of my recording career, I had to talk myself out of losing my cool, all the while trying to contend with guys trying to take my shirt off. My pants too, for that matter.”

According to Tina, despite what it looks like, there is no “institutionalized sexism” in comedy. It’s not about women being unfunny, or a sketch about maxi-pad belts being bad, it’s that “sometimes they literally just didn’t know what we were talking about.” Also, men pee in cups that they leave around the office.

Working with Women

Shania: “Of course, as I learned the hard way there, working with other women can subject you to jealousy, cattiness and drama, with the added dynamic of PMS, which men just don’t bring to the scene.”

Tina: “This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice: you are not in competition with other women. You are in competition with everyone. Also, I encourage them to always wear a bra.”

Fame

Shania was so busy, she didn’t have time to pee. “I know, I know: it sounds ridiculous, how could anyone forget to eat and go pee?”

Having money gives Tina class anxiety. “I know it’s bull**** that I say ‘babysitter.’ What I have is a full-time nanny, and I should be roundly punished for trying to make it seem like the teenager next door comes over one night a week.” ■

FROM THIS MOMENT ON, BY SHANIA TWAIN, HC, HARPER COLLINS, 409 PP., $29.99. 

BOSSYPANTS, BY TINA FEY, HC, REAGAN ARTHUR BOOKS, 288 PP., $29.99

http://www.montrealmirror.com/wp/2011/06/23/man-i-feel-like-a-woman/

From This Moment On

Brittany Weddle, Detroit Books Examiner
October 3, 2011

Everyone knows who Shania Twain is. She's a singer/songwriter with a voice like no other. She's a five time Grammy award winner  and has won twenty-seven BMI songwriters awards. Three of her albums have been certifided Diamond (who knew such a thing exsisted?) by the Recording Industry Association of America. Shania Twain is the second bestselling artist in Canada, with C'eline Dion being at the top. Shania is known to many as "The First Lady of Country Music" and has sold more than seventy-five million albums.

During Shania Twain's 1998 Come on over tour, she played several dates right here in our own backyard. On July 20,1998, she played in Clarkson at the Pine Knob Music Theater, which later became the DTE Energy Music Theater. She played another show at the same theater the very next night. On July 21,1998, she played again in Grand Rapids at the Van Andel Arena. Fortunatly, Shania made another come back with her Up! tour. On October 4,2003, she played again in Grand Rapids at the Van Andel Arena. A few weeks after that, she came back into town. She played two dates in Auburn Hills at the Palace of Aurburn Hills.

Her life hasn't always been full of glitz and glammer. She grew up with little to no money with a step father who abused her mother. She lost both her paren's while she was still in her twenties and struggled with raising her sibilings. She married and had a son, divorced, and married again. She talks about it all in her autobiography: From This Moment On

Anyone who is a Shania Twain fan will love this tell all book and even if you're not a fan, pick it up anyways. By the time you pick up this book, you will defently be a fan. She doesn't just talk about her life, but gives helpful advice throughout the book, as well as never before seen pictures. So come on over to your nearest book store and pick a copy. Because from this moment on, it's sure to become one of your favorite reads.

http://www.examiner.com/books-in-detroit/from-this-moment-on

The Glory of Oprah

Why the “talkinest child” understands women and the power of television better than anyone else.

By Caitlin Flanagan

The three-episode finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show consisted of a two-part spectacular at the United Center in Chicago and a final sermon delivered from the show’s studio at Harpo Productions. Together, these three hours of television encompassed many of the program’s enduring concerns: celebrity, philanthropy, Dale Carnegie–style positive thinking, and—the true foundation of the show and its creator—the theology of the black Baptist Church that raised her. “To God be the glory,” were her final words to us from her stage, a sentiment sure to inflame her legion of critics (what a pompous way to sign off from an afternoon chat show!), and one that explains, more than anything else, how this remarkable woman created a vast financial empire and became one of the most influential figures in the private lives of millions of American women.

Despite the grandeur and moment of the three-parter, despite its show-stopping intensity and buckled-down determination to sum up a 25-year mission, the true genome of the project was revealed in a run-of-the-mill episode weeks earlier. No Aretha Franklin belting out “Amazing Grace” to thousands, no Diane Sawyer announcing the planting of 25,000 oak trees in Oprah’s name, no funny pictorial of tragic hairstyles—just Oprah sitting down and talking, woman-to-woman, about certain aspects of the female experience.

The guest was Shania Twain, the country- and pop-music star who has sold more than 75 million albums, and who has been in relative seclusion the past seven years, for reasons detailed in From This Moment On, the autobiography she had come on the show to promote. The book stands as a compendium of the life events about which Oprah and Oprah care most: deep childhood poverty made yet more harrowing by sexual molestation and domestic violence; the power of nothing more than an idea, a dream for oneself, to change a life forever; the triumph of material success after a harsh beginning; the particular, feminine joys to be found in buying and redecorating a beautiful house; the dirty rotten tendency of bad men and false friends to run off with one another, leaving you brokenhearted and humiliated; the ability of such betrayals to cause you—and this may be the single biggest theme of all of Oprah—to lose your voice, leading to the realization that, no matter what, you must regain your voice; and finally, the necessity of going Ancient Mariner on the whole experience, telling every secret thing to every available listener, until you and they are both free.

I happened to turn on the Shania episode a bit late, and I was standing out of sight of the television when the picture came on, so I didn’t at first see that the guest Oprah was interviewing was a superstar. I assumed the woman speaking in such plain, heartbroken terms about her divorce was a civilian. Her voice sounded thin and untrained, and the rush of words tumbled out quickly, as though she had only this one golden moment with Oprah to tell her story to the world, and after the camera switched off, she would vanish back into anonymity.

I have read a lot of celebrity memoirs, and their main shared quality is that they are slight. Not just short, and not merely ghostwritten, they usually emanate from the anonymous author’s scandalously brief time spent with the subject, and this paucity of material colors every page. I once had dinner with the most notorious of these ghostwriters, and he averred that he often types up a memoir after little more than a weekend in the company of the celebrity. (“Do you tape-record the sessions?,” I asked him, vaguely wondering if I should become a celebrity ghostwriter. “Yes,” he replied with a grossed-out shudder. “But I never listen to the tapes.”) But From This Moment On is not only 400 pages long, it’s also chockablock with detail—vivid sketches of minor characters, carefully rendered descriptions of places and states of mind. The acknowledgments seem to say that a married pair of professional writer/editors banged the thing into publishable shape, but Twain’s long description of the process of actually writing the book is clearly the plain truth. For this reason alone, it is substantially different from most other celebrity autobiographies; it feels intimate and unguarded, and it speaks of a particular and peculiar life. I liked the book, and I found that I also liked Twain, about whom I had known very little.

Twain’s early years were shaped by the kind of domestic chaos that is at once a cause and a result of poverty. Her barely educated mother—who at 16 had lost all her teeth in an accident that left her with a mouthful of cheap dentures—managed in the space of a decade to bear four children by three men, with a fifth child thrown in for good measure when his mother, a family relation, killed herself. The man with whom Twain’s mother ended her romantic run, and with whom she remained in an unhappy and often dangerous marriage until their early death in a car crash, was a wife beater who nearly killed her many times—often in front of the terrified children. He was also a fully participating member of the human condition, so that along with his violence were streaks of kindness and generosity (even broke, he would bring home desserts and little treats for the kids), in a mix of the sort that leaves children perpetually confused, even into adulthood, about the true nature of the person at whose hands they suffered.

During Twain’s adolescence, he would often come into her room at night—she was his adopted daughter—and seethe at her for being a “bitch” and a “slut.” He would beat her with a belt and kick her “in the ass.” Yet, like many an abused child before her, she has grown up into an adult who has plenty of good things to say about her monster; on balance, she thinks he was sort of a prince.

Adding to Twain’s miseries, nobody in the household was concerned or lucid enough to protect her from the creepy old man in the neighborhood who lured her with candy and then molested her. She was just getting started in a singing career when her parents were killed, leaving her no money and full charge of her three younger siblings. She moved them into a cabin near a remote holiday lodge where she got a job in a Vegas-style review, and from there she beavered away at her career while trying to raise and discipline a pack of brokenhearted adolescents.

And it is a testament to the kind of things that can and cannot break a woman that none of this sorrow and deprivation and cruelty caused Twain to lose her voice. The thing that shattered her, that had silenced her singing and sent her pursuing expert medical advice around the world, was not the violence or the hunger or the sexual abuse. It was the betrayal by her husband, an event that occurred years after they had become multimillionaires and had constructed a weird, luxurious exile for themselves in an enormous Swiss château. The affair, a garden-variety bit of midlife adultery involving a best friend, a series of deceptions, and the inevitable, explosive revelation, devastated her.

Longtime viewers of Oprah know that the host has a particular subspecialty in the husband-stealing best friend. Husband-stealing best friends are right up there with women who can’t give away a single pair of old shoes from a jam-packed closet and men who won’t do their fair share of the housework: such regular presences on the Oprah show that they are almost members of a commedia troupe. But the true author of Shania’s suffering, although she could not yet perceive it, was not the best friend; it was a succession of malevolent men: the abusive stepfather, the molesting neighbor, the cheating husband. Oprah, more than any other broadcaster ever, understands the ways men can hurt women, and it is this knowledge—hard-earned and openly shared with her audience—that has allowed her to forge such a powerful bond with her fans. That she can move so easily between episodes about, on the one hand, rape and domestic violence and, on the other, shopping and decorating, demonstrates not a lack of focus but the fact that she understands the full equation of the female experience, in ways that few others before her have. This understanding also accounts for the deep suspicion she arouses in so many men, who as a group tend to be wary of her, if not outright hostile. They’re not wrong to feel this way; she’s onto them. She has survived some of the worst they have to offer. Like Alice Walker, Oprah has been accused of hating men, black men in particular. But her attitude toward men is much more complicated and generous than they realize. It’s only when you fully apprehend the range and nature of the cruelty that men are capable of inflicting on women that you can truly appreciate its opposite. It has been Oprah’s bad and good fortune (she often says she would not on any condition change the circumstances of her young life) to have fully experienced the former.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-glory-of-oprah/8725/

Sure a Rollercoster xo to Shania