by Shania Twain
From This Moment On
ATRIA Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
[http://www.SimonandSchuster.com] www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2011 by Shania Twain
This work is a memoir. It reflects my present recollections of experiences over a period of years. Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Atria Books hardcover edition May 2011
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Designed by Joy O’Meara
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Twain, Shania.
From this moment on / Shania Twain.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Twain, Shania. 2. Country musicians—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.T953A3 2011 782.421642092—dc22
[B]
2011005554
ISBN 978-1-4516-2074-0
ISBN 978-1-4516-2076-4 (ebook)
For my son, Eja
Contents
Why Look Back?
1 So That’s What Happened to Me
2 Timmins, 1971
3 Tomboy
4 Roast Beef Families
5 Music Became My Savior
6 The Wrong Train
7 The Worst Year of My Life and the Pursuit of Happiness
8 A Teenager in Timmins
9 Avoid Open Ice
10 From High School to Hitting the Road
11 On My Own
12 Together Forever
13 Wind Beneath My Wings
14 My Little Corner of the Wild
15 New to Nashville
16 Go Home, Small-Town Girl
17 New Country, New Name
18 Meeting Mutt
19 The Woman in Me, Married
20 The Woman in Me Succeeds
21 The Flip Side of Fame
22 Life Among the Loons
23 Taking My Show on the Road
24 Come On Overseas
25 Home at Last
26 Up! Up! and Away
27 Give Me a Break
28 Never in Ten Million Years
29 Digging My Own Hole
30 Love Story
31 Rearview Mirror
32 From This Moment On
Acknowledgments
Index
Why Look Back?
Like most people, I have secrets. I have sibling secrets, friendship secrets, parent secrets, lover secrets, and other secrets, but that still leaves much to tell of my life that is not “secret.” On the other hand, secrets I’ve promised to keep are safe with me; I believe I can tell my life story without breaking these vows, and also without compromising my integrity. Long after this book has been read, secrets that have been entrusted to me will eventually die with me.
We all have our share of secrets and dirty laundry, but for me personally, I feel that the sooner I learn to relax and laugh about them, the sooner I can enjoy the relief that comes with that liberation and release. I see writing this book as a process of washing my laundry and hanging it out in the sun and fresh air to dry. A sort of emotional cleansing.
I read a quote by a woman who said she’d never write a book as a vow to take her secrets with her to her grave, but I found her thinking to be rather dramatic; after all, how many secrets can one person have? Is she implying that her whole life is a secret? How could anyone already living a full, adult life not have something worth writing about that would be of interest and possibly meaningful to someone else? Surely, if you’ve lived a life worthy of inspiring even one other person, you could do that and still maintain a healthy, personal, private boundary. In the end, maybe it’s simply more a question of whether you want to write a book or not.
Expressing the joy and pain in my life through writing has forced me to read the good and the bad with my eyes wide open, letting the pages become a mirror reflecting a self-portrait in bold black and white. It’s been both challenging and incredibly liberating. I spent quite a bit of time discussing the pages of my life with many friends and family during the process of writing this book, in a more open way than ever before. In an atmosphere similar to sitting around a campfire, we found ourselves reminiscing, exchanging stories, and sharing from the heart as we reflected together. For my sister Carrie and I especially, it’s been a particularly bonding experience gathering around our memories. The campfire spirit of laughing and singing from deep down, sharing freely and honestly, feeling safe to join in around our circle of comfort and trust.
With this book, I hope readers also feel the community spirit of the campfire and the urge to participate from the heart. To laugh and cry along with the pages, feeling that we are all around the same campfire.
I read this once about fire, and it rings so true to me: “Fire can give wings of courage, compassion, and devotion. Fire is obstinate and heady and absolutely not subtle. It is seen as the force burning inside us, giving us an iron willpower to go for our goals, bestowing upon us the passion to do it with all of ourselves, resulting in the honor and freedom to do it without backstabbing and with an open face.”
My life has had its ups and downs, but there is always more than one side to a person’s story. The flip side of those challenges—the joys and positive swings, the pleasures that came like the good along with the bad—are a promise of inevitable contrast, necessary to maintaining the delicate component of balance.
I believe deeply that everything is relative. We need the bad to appreciate the good, and vice versa. We need something unexpected to happen in order for us to realize that everything else was expected. It’s in our relation to those things that we are able to decide how we feel and the level of intensity of those feelings. Such is relativity. There’s no getting off life’s roller coaster once it’s rolling, so you might as well try to understand it as best you can so you might flow with the curves and actually enjoy the ride. In my life, there have been sharp turns and unexpected falls; what I thought were my “life’s most embarrassing moments,” or things that I thought would kill me once, I can, in some cases, now reflect upon with a grin. I now find it therapeutic to share some of the experiences, and find it rewarding when they hold value in the life of someone else as well.
Albert Einstein wrote in his Autobiographical Notes, “I do, in fact, believe that it is a good thing to show those who are striving alongside of us how our own striving and searching appears in retrospect.” I read this passage after I’d finished writing this book, and it perfectly expresses my own feelings about sharing my life story.
The process of writing it all down forced me to revisit a lot of times and places from my past, as well as relive a tidal wave of emotions. Memories can be like nightmares. Some people fight them, but others might feel that the only way out of the nightmare is to freeze and remain frozen. I remind myself regularly of how grateful I am for the self-survival exercise of brushing and combing through my thoughts and memories. The endless fingering through thousands of what, at times, seemed to be hair roots for lice eggs clinging to each strand for dear life, tryin
g to hang on long enough so they get the chance to hatch and infest my head like creepy, crawly nightmares. Once they hatch, everything has to be stripped down and either thrown away or washed over and over again. I’ve heard that putting all your laundry outside overnight in the middle of winter works to kill the cycle of reproduction of these unwelcome nightmares, but what about thoughts and emotions? What do you do with them when they start keeping you up at night and nesting in the roots of your very sanity? Sticking them outside for the night in the middle of winter would only turn you into an ice cube, a frozen block so cold you might never be warm again. This is what happens sometimes to hearts so broken and minds so haunted they don’t know what to do. They can’t find the strength to labor over washing and rinsing and washing and rinsing again, till all the nightmares are cleaned out.
Sometimes during such episodes of what feels almost like borderline insanity, it may seem easier to just stay comfortably numb with drugs and alcohol. Many suffering souls take this route, but I don’t recommend it. Personally, I find it safer to face the pain and allow yourself to feel it. It hurts like hell once you start to thaw, but the alternative—freezing to death spiritually and emotionally—is worse. Thawing a broken heart, spirit, or mind is painful no matter how you became numb in the first place, but a wise friend’s advice worked very well for me. She told me that when the storm picks up, I should lean into the wind instead of turning away from it if I wanted to keep my balance. Running with the wind at my back would only give it the advantage to knock me over. She was right. Better to brace yourself and face it head-on.
There have been moments in my life when I wasn’t so confident tomorrow would ever come, so once I began writing this book, it started crossing my mind more regularly that perhaps I’d better hurry up and document my life story in case I run out of time. Hurry to ensure that my story would not be put together with half-truths someday, misconstrued through articles and various other media exploitation. I’m also writing this in order for my son, Eja, to have an honest and complete account of my life should I not get the chance to tell him about it myself—just as my mother never got the chance to tell me more about herself. She died in a car accident at the age of forty-two, three years younger than I am now. It’s an empty, helpless feeling to have so many questions for my mother and know that they will never be answered. The finality of mortality and the fact that you can never go back and get your questions answered directly has often frustrated me and left me feeling helpless, with a longing impossible to satisfy. I don’t want my son to have to draw conclusions about me based on bits and pieces of memory or other people’s recollections, but instead from my own heart and mind. This has been a key reason behind why I decided to document my life story.
I thought that maybe I could tell a sweeter version of my experiences, so the reader could get the gist of what my life has been, while I avoided telling about the punches and focused more on how I rolled with them instead. Although I did manage to roll with the punches some of the time, other times they hit me square in the head. I struggled for a while about how to get started with writing this book without telling the whole story, but no matter at what angle I attempted this, I concluded that there is no way of telling a story with integrity if you don’t have the conviction to tell it without ducking and hiding the whole way. It was important for me to clearly explain the context and still be satisfied that I’d written an honest autobiography. Without braving through the painful explanation of the most difficult moments, the story is half empty, half true, and could even end up being misleading as a result. The complete picture is worth telling if your intent is to share the truth about yourself, how it’s shaped who you’ve become, how you once thought, and how you think now after what you’ve learned and what it is you’ve learned.
When I told a friend of mine who’s lived a very interesting life so far that I was writing my autobiography, he said to me that although he has much to write himself, his fear of overwhelming his sensitive friends and family, who are inevitably associated with his story, led him to give up on documenting his fantastic journey for as long as it was practical, as so many people he knows are still alive. I think the likelihood of him outliving almost everyone he knows, although possible, isn’t very promising. Even if he does, will he have the capacity to write his story then? That leaves millions of people who may never benefit from his remarkable story. For me, personally, there is a great deal of meaning in writing about my life in the event anyone ever finds my experiences useful as a guide in some way, or as inspiration to endure their own struggles. That maybe someone will find it helpful in a fellowship-like communication of one human being sharing with another. I believe sharing my life story serves more purpose than keeping it to myself, and I recommend writing your life story even if you don’t plan on sharing it publicly, and noting in your will that by a specific year, for example, your story should be given to specified people for private use only. Autobiographies are not only for the purpose of public reading. In my case, as a public personality, I decided to use the platform of fame to hopefully inspire those looking for comfort, so that they can know they are not alone in the things we might have in common. No matter who we are, human suffering does not discriminate.
I have been quite closed about my private life until now for a couple of reasons. Not only was I embarrassed to reveal certain details to even my closest friends, it bothered me to look back on some of the more painful things, and I preferred to leave them as forgotten. Other aspects of my life I simply took for granted as not holding much value or being relevant or important enough to bother sharing.
The most obvious question is, “Why look back?” As I already explained, I wrote this book for the sake of thoroughly and accurately documenting my life and so that it might be of some help to others; but it has also been a positive force in keeping me moving forward during some personal lows, helping to prevent me from getting bogged down in self-pity, shame, depression, disappointment, and fear. In dealing with these emotions rather than avoiding them and coming to terms with them so I could move on to the future without missing the present, this book is that precious piece that bridges the past to the future. I had a certain level of discomfort while writing about my past but feel more at peace with it now that I’ve revisited it and given it a chance at a new understanding. Now that I have a midlife level of maturity and experience, it’s as though the past is allowed to be a part of who I am now and not just of who I was, as if it was something I didn’t want to be associated with anymore. But I knew deep down that those experiences were imprinted on me in the grooves of my memory, in the very formation of my character, and as permanent stamps on my emotions. I still thought I was “okay” with keeping painful things in their rightful place of “things that have already happened and can now be forgotten” and that I was perfectly fine being passive, confident that I was currently unaffected by what was now behind me, with no need to ever “go there” again.
I have to say, it’s been satisfying bringing myself up-to-date with myself, if you will, through writing this book. I can see now that I was missing out on some wonderful feelings and emotions from the memories of my youth as a result of closing the book too tightly behind myself—leaving the chapters to collect dust on a shelf so high above arm’s reach that it would take too much effort to reopen them down the road. Much to my relief, in some instances I can say there were things I thought would be a lot scarier than they actually were when revisiting them, and it surprised me how things seemed so much smaller in retrospect. It’s like the giant tree at the end of your grandparents’ driveway, which you thought only Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk could ever be brave enough to climb. But when you go back as an adult, that towering tree might now be dwarfed in comparison to the magnified lens you once saw it through as a tiny child.
Before I started writing, this pretty much summed up my attitude toward the past: “That was then; tomorrow’s another day.” I did that because some of my past was painfu
l, and this outlook helped me stay afloat. Now I see that in closing off part of my past, I also missed what was happening to me in the present. I was always in a rush toward tomorrow. Sometimes addressing things openly at the time they happen prevents “getting stuck” later on.
I was unhappy. My life had been a fight for security, a place in the world, the chance to pursue my goals. From a very young age, I grew up with the mind-set of a survivor, like a boxer in the middle of the ring, constantly spinning and turning, ready to punch anyone coming at me. Life was not going to knock me down! I had to make it. So I didn’t let anyone close enough to find a weakness that could undermine me. I lived in this survivor mode into my adult years and through the ascent of my music career. Long after I’d achieved success and security, I still kept my dukes up, as if no one told me that the fight was over or that I was at least between rounds. It was exhausting living in this defensive state, and other than being tired of it, I also slowly began to feel more confident that life wasn’t necessarily trying to beat me up all the time.
The bell still sounds for my defensive survival mode now and then, but I practice not responding to it. I now find it more worthwhile trying to accept that my days will unfold as they will. That’s not to say I’ve become complacent. I’ve just redirected that strength to pursuing the fun stuff.
I also no longer sweat the discomfort of sharing the past, the present, or the voyage along the way. And I don’t see any point in keeping my story to myself, as explaining about life with my parents, for example, might inspire and give strength to many suffering men and women out there who can relate to and benefit from my parents’ challenges, and from the courage they displayed during some of the more difficult times. It would be a shame for their life’s experiences to have died along with them. Better to remember even their pain as a source of inspiration than to forget them in vain. My parents were conscientious people with good intentions. If they were alive today to reflect on the years when my brothers and sisters and I were growing up, they might not feel that they’d lived up to their good intentions. There were plenty of times when the Twain family didn’t have enough to eat, lacked warm clothes in the frigid Northern Ontario winters, and lived in a cramped, rented apartment or house with no heat. The perpetual undertow of financial instability took its toll in other ways, as it usually does, compromising my parents’ love for each other at times and no doubt feeding my mother’s recurrent bouts of depression.
