In an interview with Billboard at the time of the planning and launch of her 2023 tour, Shania Twain shared a hugely uplifting setlist that she had believed she would never sing again five years earlier.
She confessed, “My days are very long,” but if anyone was up for the task, it was Twain. The kind of sorrow and misery that would shatter many individuals have already been endured by her.
And it all began when she was quite young. Twain’s life has been everything but simple, from growing up in poverty to fighting against the patriarchal views of a male-dominated industry.
Her triumphant album’s release and return to the stage after a period that would be a death knell for most artists are testaments to an iron and unshakable will. This kind can only be attained after a lifetime of suffering.
Struggles began for Shania Twain the moment she was born. In her autobiography, “From This Moment On,” she described how the doctor had given her mother a cigarette. She delivered the dreadful news that her daughter had died following a protracted and traumatic breech birth. Against all chances, the baby did eventually breathe for the first time.
Named Eilleen Regina Edwards at birth, Twain was her mother’s second child and the first with husband Clarence Edwards. Twain’s older sister, Jill, had been born not long after their mother’s fiancé died in a car accident, and her marriage to Edwards would be no happier.
Twain’s parents split when she was a little child, and even though her mother had assured her that her father had requested that he cut all links with the family, Twain couldn’t help but wonder. “Growing up, I knew he existed,” she wrote. “I wondered if he cared about me and what he thought of me.”
When Twain’s mother married the man she would eventually call her father, she was just about to enter kindergarten. She characterized Jerry Twain, an Ojibway Native, as having “a bright, charming personality with a playful character and plenty of jokes and pranks up his sleeve.” She remembered that even as a young girl, she realized that her parents had a violent relationship, despite her praise for her stepfather’s virtues.
Shania Twain has been extraordinarily open about how her family’s poverty-stricken upbringing affected them. When she sat down to talk with Hoda Kotb on “Making Space with Hoda Kotb,” she recounted anecdotes of how difficult it was to grow up in Canada without having access to things like warm clothing and waterproof boots, as well as what it was like to have to make up an excuse for skipping lunch.
In her memoir, “From This Moment On,” Twain said that despite her stepfather’s steady employment in a series of fluctuating minimum-wage jobs, the family’s constant financial difficulties eventually led to physical aggression.
In one instance, she described how her stepfather “slammed her [mother’s] head against the side of the basin, knocking her out cold,” and that “it’s likely that my mother might have been nagging him about not having enough grocery money.” Jerry could be seen repeatedly inserting and removing her mother’s head into the toilet bowl.
The police were called as Twain and her sisters fled to the snow-covered porch and screamed. She recalled that when law officers arrived, the fighting stopped, and they said, “Until next time.”