Shania Twain has released an autobiography called From This Moment On that’s packed with shocking revelations. Fans know she grew up in poverty without enough food to eat, surviving on bread with milk and brown sugar, but it wasn’t widely known that her stepfather Jerry physically and emotionally abused the entire family. One horrifying memory Shania has is of Jerry pushing her mother’s head into the toilet repeatedly after knocking her out cold. Shania says years later, when she was 11, she stood up to Jerry, writing: “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!” Another revelation was that Shania lost the ability to sing after she discovered her then-husband Mutt Lange cheating on her, due to a condition called dysphonia, in which the muscles squeeze the voice box. “My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice,” the singer told Oprah Winfrey this week. “I was losing it slowly and progressively.”
About Lange leaving her for Marie-Anne Thiébaud, Shania wrote in her book: “I’ll be honest: when your husband leaves you, and falls into the arms of your close friend, your self-esteem can really suffer.” However, it looks like Shania had the last laugh when she married Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Swiss business executive Frédéric Thiébaud. She says watching his poise when it became clear that both their spouses were involved in an extramarital affair helped her get through the ordeal. “I got to observe Fred going through the same that I was, and I admired how he handled it,” she told Redbook. “That is where I fell in love with him, because he was so exemplary in every way.” ~Alexandra Heilbron