Tommy's #1 SHANIA TWAIN SuperSite Message Board

Shania Twain Returns to the Spotlight
By Nathalie Atkinson
May 11, 2011

After a bad breakup, most women simply go out and get a bad haircut. After hers, superstar Shania Twain got a deluxe tour bus, enlisted her little sis Carrie Ann and took up that most Canadian of pastimes: she went on a cross-country road trip. Twain chronicles this emotional and geographic journey to the landmarks of her life in both Why Not? With Shania Twain, a new docu-series debuting Friday, and in her new autobiography.

Twain’s legion of fans are already familiar with the top notes of her story — from the peripatetic childhood and sudden death of both parents that left younger siblings in her care to her big Nashville break at Deerhurst resort, marriage to reclusive producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, hit albums and stratospheric rise to superstardom. What’s new and surprising for the guarded private artist is that she lays her point of view bare onscreen and in print for all to see — including her raw anger, disbelief and hurt at being betrayed by her spouse and best friend.

Sporting a casual off-duty wardrobe that boasts an array of zip hoodies to rival Mark Zuckerberg’s, Twain faces the demons of her past and retraces crucial moments of her past starting with her hometown of Timmins in Northern Ontario.

Surrounded by a cluster of trusted lifelong family friends, she visits the tiny house where the walls echoed with the sounds of her parents fighting and her father hitting her mother, and where there wasn’t enough to eat. She tentatively harmonizes onstage at the rebuilt Maple Leaf Hotel where she played as a teen before flaming out due to faltering self-confidence on that fateful Deerhurst cabaret stage.

She tours the backstage amenities of Cesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, marvelling that the dressing room alone is 3,500 square feet.

“It was very scary, making the decision to do it,” Twain explains of the series and of her new autobiography, From This Moment On, both unveiled on Oprah in early May.

It was there the singer spoke openly and publicly for the first time about the revelations of infidelity and divorce (and subsequent re-marriage to her betraying former best friend’s husband, Frederic Thiebaud). A week later, Twain is perched across from me in a downtown Toronto hotel suite and says she’s experiencing a welcome relief now that both of the projects are out there.

“Every step has had its own level of anxiety attached,” Twain says. The relief comes, “because I’m now in the interaction with the fans and the public and sensing their connection to the book, and I’m just sensing a community spirit. We’re all in this together,” she adds. “I’m sure many people have experienced these things and I’m hoping that they relate, and benefit.”

The book is raw, detailing the abject poverty of her childhood to the deterioration of Twain’s 14-year marriage to Lange that ended, in 2008, with the discovery of his affair with her best friend and confidante Marie-Anne. (The couple share son Eja and maintain a cordial relationship.)

Lange is notoriously private and until the breakup, so was Twain; the couple lived on a remote private chateau compound in Switzerland. “The privacy that I protected in my public life was the same everywhere, in my private life,” she’ll admit now, conceding that it was too extreme. “It was too much for me because I was cramping my own self-expression. And that really did manifest itself physically.”

Spoiler alert: Twain’s years of masterfully suppressing emotion date back to her childhood exposure to her mother’s domestic abuse and her parents’ death which, compounded with the shocking way her marriage ended, are the reason she is now without her signature singing voice.

“I’m telling you, it’s very real,” Twain says of the vocal condition, called dysphonia; another aspect of the series concerns Twain’s quest to regain her performing voice and confidence.

“I’m glad that now I know what it is and I can do something about it, but it’s scary that something can grip you like that. That was a very long time coming over the course of my life,” she continues. “This is why now I’m like, OK, I gotta throw myself into whatever it is I’m really scared of and just face it all head on. I don’t care whatever happens to me in the end but when I come out the other side, maybe I will have a healthier balance of where those boundaries are.”

In the series, that means not only the series title, but its experiences. Twain takes a literal leap by skydiving, for example.

It’s the rare celebrity who reveals her true soft, vulnerable centre.

Literally: at 45, Twain’s autobio also ruefully reveals, her legendarily photogenic washboard abs are now considerably less so. We learn that friends call her Eilleen, her mother and siblings affectionately called her Leeny and that Lange’s pet name for her was Woody.

She recounts shooting early music videos with Sean Penn (to whom she still owes $100) and John Derek, being a tree-planting crew boss in the wilds of the northern bush and browsing Honest Ed’s discount emporium and taking in a Van Halen concert at the CNE during her early days in Toronto. That music, she writes, was a passion more than an ambition. That Lange is an avid and hands-on landscape gardener. That she missed cooking and housework in the busy years (yes, really!).

For years, Shania (her adopted stage name since the early 1990s) and the real Eilleen existed as two distinct, compartmentalized personas. “I never feel like Shania Twain, to be honest,” she explains to the docu-camera. “I’m Eilleen Twain and Shania is part of who I am.”

But no longer. Twain says the Shania viewers follow onscreen is the real her.

Twain does make one concession to the different facets of the real Twain that emerge in each medium. She relished writing every word of the 400-page autobio herself, but admits that the series isn’t as in-depth.

“The element, concept and purpose of the series is more for me to live out daily what I have been preaching to myself every day, with the mindset of ‘why not?” Because,” she continues, “that’s been my morning mantra when I’m doubting doing anything. (Making it) was like making a commitment saying ‘OK, I’m going to allow you guys to film me, and now I have no choice but to force myself through this because someone’s watching me now.’ I have to be accountable for what I’ve been saying to myself. And that’s what I’m doing — it’s therapy. It was my therapy."