Shania why not

Viewers will follow Twain as she begins her climb back to the top through a personal journey filled with risk, revelations and unexpected adventures.

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The Rise of Will Smith. Watch the video. Recently viewed Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more. Twain did not make a record for 15 years. It is only six weeks since she had laryngoplasty, an operation to reconstruct the vocal box. A two-inch horizontal scar is stripped across her neck.

Actually, she says, she was lucky. Her vocal cord paralysis was a result of being bitten by a tick and contracting Lyme disease. It can go to your brain. It is hard to conceive just how huge the country-pop star was when disaster struck. Without Shania Twain, there might well have been no Taylor Swift. Come on Over, which has sold 40m copies, is the bestselling album by a female artist and the ninth-top seller of all time in the US.

She lay down her acoustic guitar, put on heels, lippy and thigh-length boots and morphed from conventional country singer to rock goddess. Twain was sexy, empowering and funny. This was a woman who knew what she wanted — men, action, dancing, control. As she sang on Man! I Feel Like a Woman! She was fancied by the straight boys, admired by the straight girls, adored by gay men as a camp icon and loved by lesbians who read what they wanted into Man!

I Feel Like a Woman!. Twain and Lange had a son, Eja pronounced Asia , in , and she planned herself some family time. But, of course, I would have never stayed away 15 years. For years, we heard nothing. Then, in , Twain announced that she and Lange were separating.

Their eventual divorce was not only the end of a marriage, it was also the end of one of the most successful and lucrative relationships in music. But even that was not the headline news. For a while, Twain retreated back into silence. She still could not sing. There looked to be no chance of her resurrecting her career. She had not performed live since July They might not have the hooks of her best work with Lange, but they provide a fascinating insight into her life.

The lyrics are as personal as they get — from the shock of being deserted to the anger she feels towards her former friend. You do not hold back, I say. She laughs and suggests I do not know the half of it. In fact, there were songs she wrote that were so vitriolic they could not go on the album.

There was one song I wrote about my cheating friend and there was a lot of fucks in there. In the flesh, there is something so wholesome and mumsy about Twain that it comes as a shock when she swears. She is small and strikingly pretty in , scientists at the University of Toronto declared that she had the perfect face. Today, she is an unlikely mix of dress-down casual and showbiz glam — black tracksuit bottoms, a black-and-white striped sweatshirt, trainers, false eyelashes with which you could sweep the floor and a huge diamond knuckle-duster on her wedding finger.

We meet in a Los Angeles hotel. The room is empty, but for three Brobdignagian bouquets of white roses. She tells me how much she loves roses, then returns to the subject uppermost in her mind. That felt good to say. Those words were cathartic.

Twain went through a terrible low after the breakup. She had always been a private person, but in she wrote a memoir, From This Moment On, in which she admitted that there had been times when she wanted to die. It was part confessional, part warning, part self-help manual for people going through similar crises.

Why do you have AA meetings? She says two things saved her. First, there was Eja. She could not afford to go under, because he needed her. Second, she revisited her past; it helped to put everything in context. To say Twain had a traumatic childhood is an understatement. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, and never knew her biological father.

Her mother, Sharon, had depression; her stepfather, Jerry, was an Ojibwa Native American, much discriminated against, alcoholic, violent and mentally ill. A number of them died prematurely just from neglect and alcohol abuse. There was little work around, no money and a lot of violence.

My mom was quite violent, too. In her memoir, she describes an occasion when Jerry beat Sharon unconscious, then repeatedly plunged her head in the toilet. Twain grabbed a chair and smashed it across his back. He punched her in the jaw; she punched him back. Twain was 11 at the time. Her father often abused her. She stutters to a stop. Did he sexually abuse her? How old were you when he started abusing you? I learned to block it out.

She started writing songs as a young girl. Did she want to be a star? Violent home. Nothing to eat. And it really works. A lot of kids play with dolls and I played with words and sounds. By the age of eight, she was singing in bars to pay the family bills.