As Shania Twain's comeback approaches – she releases her first album since 2017, Queen of Me, on February 3rd – the star is looking back on the makings of her career.
The singer has been working since the late 1980s, after a tumultuous childhood growing up in Ontario, Canada in the 1960s and 1970s.
Speaking with The Guardian ahead of her new album's release, she reflected on her past, and, opening up about her parents, she detailed the difficulty she has had knowing they never got to see her fame.
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Shania was raised by her mother and stepfather – she didn't have contact with her biological father after she was two years old – though the two were killed in a tragic car accident when she was twenty-two, in 1987.
She had complicated relationships with both. She maintains that while her mother was a huge supporter of hers, it often came from a place of seeing her own daughter as a source of income.
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"I was her hope, the one who would make it. I think she recognized the dysfunction in our life, and thought that side would be solved somehow along the way," the Man! I Feel Like a Woman hitmaker explained.
© Photo: Getty ImagesThe star's first album was released in 1993, six years after her parents' death
Meanwhile, she recently opened up about the sexual abuse she faced at the hands of her stepfather starting when she was ten years old. Her latest feature in The Guardian reveals she never had the opportunity to confront him prior to his death.
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There's a lot that her parents were never able to see, and despite their fraught relationship, she admitted: "When I started to win awards was when it really bothered me the most that my parents were not there to see the glory," adding: "Because I felt that they had sacrificed so much. And they deserved to share in those moments."
Shania will also be going on tour to promote her new album
She said: "It was a treacherous relationship, anyway, for all of us. The sacrifice on their part was just suffering through all of those arguments. And, in the end, I make it and they're not there to say: 'Well, at least it was for something.'
"It's very painful. It's very, very sad that they never got to see one moment of it."
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