Celebrity Season: Shania Twain

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/07/2011 (5555 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“That don’t impress me much,”Canadian countrystar Shania Twain sings in one of her most famous hits, and readers of this autobiography may feel the same.

Diehard fans may enjoy the 26 chapters of buildup to the issue that prompted this book, her producer-husband Mutt Lange’s affair and exit with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud.

But politely interested readers may conk out before the last six juicy chapters even start. The overall problem with this book is a lack of good editing. Twain may be a fabulous singer, but she’s a rambler and she gets bogged down in details.

She admits she wrote the book backwards. The broken-hearted country rock goddess from Timmins, Ont., started writing her thoughts and feeling as therapeutic venting after Lange left her in her castle in Switzerland.

In the end, Twain decided there was more to her than a marital mess, so she started writing about the rest of her life leading up to the A-bomb.

Of course, as is common knowledge, she received encouragement and cut-and-paste help from the man who became her new husband two and a half years after the affair’s discovery — Marie-Anne’s handsome ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud. Good on ya, Shania!

Canadian readers, especially, will be on Twain’s side right from the beginning. She’s sweet and truthful, and tells embarrassing details from her growing up — a good portion of it in Timmins. There are also two fat sections of photos from the different stages of her life.

Born Eilleen Twain on Aug. 28, 1965, the skinny little girl with the big talent went through tough times with her parents who drank and fought violently, but loved each other and the kids. Shania also experienced poverty to the point of going hungry.

“I spent a lot of my youth jealous of what other people ate,” she writes. “When our cupboards were empty, my school lunch was likely to contain a ‘poor man’s sandwich’ — mustard or mayonnaise spread on two slices of white bread.”

To top off the hardships in her family, her folks died in their early 40s in a car accident. But Twain was a talented singer-songwriter starting in grade school, and her mom sacrificed essentials to help her get onstage.

In the end, mama knew best. Music would save Shania from poverty in her teens and make her a wealthy woman in her 20s. But money couldn’t save her daughter from heartbreak, anger, pain and guilt at spilling the beans.

Unfortunately, Twain uses up far too much real estate in the book justifying a tell-all and stating her good intentions. We don’t care if she badmouths the backstabber.

Winnipeg journalist Maureen Scurfield writes the Miss Lonelyhearts column for the Free Press.