Shania Twain On Discovering Her Husband Was Cheating With Her Best Friend | The Marilyn Denis Show

How are you doing? Everybody's so cheery. I love it. Cheery. Congratulations. New beginnings for you. New beginnings. Yes. Back to Canada. New book. New marriage. Happy? Couldn't be happier. Yeah. That's an understatement. Yeah. Doing really, really, really well. Yeah. I want to... We don't have a lot of time with you, so I want to make the most of the time. First of all, you look great. Thank you. You really do. Thank you. And why did you pick this time to resurface? Well, I'm resurfacing on a different... On a deeper level. It's not really just about resurfacing professionally. Right. I've always been a very private person, so this is us surfacing for the first time on a personal level. Very, very deliberately. Very necessary for myself personally. Musically, it's been a bit of a challenge and part of the whole journey, trying to get my voice back, learning how to build my confidence back again without my music partner of 14 years. Yeah. So that was a whole new beginning as well. Sure. The songwriting and the production of everything. So I'm just much more independent by force, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes life just pushes you in whether you can swim or not, and that's it. That's it. And then you sink or swim. Yeah, yeah. From this moment on is the name of the book, the name of a very special love song that you and Matt wrote together. Yes, that's right. And you chose that song. Well, you know, we wrote a lot of beautiful love songs together. A lot of the songs we wrote together became, you know, many people's wedding songs, for example, Forever and For Always. Yes. So, great memories, and I just have a... I'm just grateful I've got a beautiful collection of music. I've got wonderful memories, and now I'm creating new ones. Yeah. So, propelling you to... Like, you know, you starting off, we were going to get a lot of your story with this new docu-series, which is, by the way, is excellent. Thank you. Excellent. And your journey, once again, you're taking that journey again. Well, you know, taking the scary journey and getting out there and engaging myself with the public is scary on a personal level, because again, you know, that's just a very new thing for me. And, you know, just dealing with a lot of truths in my life, I've been very restrained and very... I've lacked a lot of self-expression through my life from a very, very early age, and that's manifested itself into my voice, and I really need to deal with that and face that, you know, head on. And so I'm doing that through the series by forcing myself out of my comfort zone, doing things that are uncomfortable, scary, awkward, embarrassing, you know, I have to go through this whole process of getting my voice back again, and it's a really strange... So I do it all in front of the cameras and embarrass myself, of course, and talk about a lot of sensitive things, and it's just really necessary for me. But it isn't all about me. It's also about knowing and understanding how it does feel to not feel like you can express yourself. Right. And having that accumulate your whole life through extreme situations, and if anyone else out there can benefit by knowing that, yes, it does take some courage, it is scary to step out and open up, you know, open yourself up, maybe they will find inspiration and hope to do that themselves. It's just so necessary to not stay behind, hide behind your fears. So I'm facing my fears here, and it's really awkward and uncomfortable. But you're facing your fears through this book and through the docu-series. So let me ask you, what changed after 14 years of marriage? What changed? I think things were changing progressively, over time, slowly. I do believe that at the particular time of the end of my marriage, we were going through a low in our marriage, which, you know, all marriages do. Sure. I'm not so sure that if there hadn't been an interruption by a third party, I'm not even so sure if the marriage would have ended at that point. I'll never know that. But we were definitely going through, you know, a communication low, and yeah, it just unfortunately fell apart, but yeah, it's one of those difficult phases in your life, and I really underestimated the true grief that divorce brings, especially when you have a family. I really underestimated it. I think maybe just because it's so common. It's so common. You hear about it all the time. And I just thought, well, you know, this happens every day. Why am I so upset about this? Why can't I just get over it? You know, why is it hitting me so hard? Is it my age? I'm midlife. Is it because I'm a mother? I didn't quite get it, and I just realized that it's a genuine deep loss, and you've got to go through the grieving, especially when there's a betrayal involved. That just makes it really ugly. How did you find out about the betrayal? Fred actually told me about it himself directly, although I had suspected not an affair, but I suspected something was suspicious. Something was off. Something was off, and I was trying to get to the bottom of it. I did speak to Marianne a lot about it. And Fred was married to Marianne, your good friend. Yes, that's right. Okay. So Fred reached out to me and said, you know, and we had a very, Fred and I had a very formal relationship. We didn't know each other one-on-one very well at all. He was my friend's husband, and that was it. So for Fred to call me out of the blue, he had never made a one-on-one direct phone call to me ever before, and I thought that was quite strange. And he said, you know, I just would like to speak to you in person about Marianne, and I don't want to explain it over the phone. So he came over and explained everything, and that was it, really. Did you believe him at first? No, I didn't. I didn't believe him at all. I thought he was... I had to say, oh, you're, you know, you're crazy. I mean, you know, you're exaggerating, or you're being dramatic. I'm sure they were, you know, they've just been together a lot lately because maybe she needs support. I don't know. I made up every excuse you can imagine. And what could Fred do? I mean, he just said, well, you know, I've got as much proof as I need to be sure, and if you're not going to believe me, then I'll just have to, you know, leave you with that. And, you know, we didn't, we communicated regularly after that, just basically while things really started to unravel, and while I started to slowly accept it, and he was there supporting me, and, you know, was very gracious about me saying, oh, you're really crazy. I mean, there's no way this is happening, and I really don't believe you, and I'm sorry, but I think maybe you might be a little over the top here, yeah. And the confirmation came to you, so he found out, he told you, then you went back to Mutt and said? Yes, yes. So, well, I just, I asked him what was going on. First, I actually asked Marianne what was going on, not letting her know that I'd been speaking to Fred, because I wanted to hear, give her the opportunity to say it herself, without me accusing her, because I really genuinely did not believe it. And so I just said, you know, is there something you need to tell me, is, you know, are you holding something back, and, you know, are you, is there something Mutt needs to tell me that maybe you're, you know, keeping from me? No, no, of course not, I would never do that, I mean, I would never lie to you about anything or hold anything, you know, back from you. She was so convincing, and she was so, she started to cry, and she was so devastated that I didn't trust her, after all these years of friendship, that I, I would, I believed her. So I went back to Fred, I called on the phone while she was still there, up in the little side room, and said, Fred, you know, I just, I'm sitting here with her, I'm asking her if there's anything she needs to tell me, and she's so upset with me, that I really do think you need to, you know, check your sources, you know, I really, I believe her, I think you're wrong, and there was quite a bit of time that went, that passed before I really did accept it, and it just unraveled slowly, you know, as these things do. And so, as we move forward a little bit, you know, then it kind of manifested itself into what, you know, as you talked about that. Well, I started digging myself a very deep hole, and I can tell you, digging is a lot easier than climbing, okay? Yeah, that's true. And so I was digging, digging, digging, digging, digging, and getting deeper into this hole of obsession over all the answers I wasn't getting. It was such a mysterious situation, I was dealing with the shock and the grief and the whole thing, starting my life over again, and... Not getting out of bed. Not getting out of bed, I got very, I did get out of bed for my son. I managed, I can say that being a parent does get you through difficult times, even when my parents died, for example, knowing that there were other responsibilities with my, you know, siblings and the house, having something, something or someone that's depending on you does help, you know, and keeps you, forces you out of bed. But the minute he was, you know, Asia was back in school every day, I was, yeah, I would go back to bed or I needed to take a lot of hot baths, I was freezing, I was, I was in shock, and I didn't eat for a solid week, and really suffered through a serious shock that first week. And then I got really angry, really, really angry that I couldn't get the answers that I wanted, that I was all of a sudden out, like that's it, you know. That, well, that was then and this is now, just like that, and it was just, I couldn't deal with it, so I got very, very angry, I was very upset, made a few very nasty phone calls to Marianne, she changed her phone number, and then I never spoke to her again. And emails too. And emails, lots of, lots of nasty emails, like, you know, I had, I had a lot of mixed emotions because I, I cared about her and I wanted it to be, I wanted her to change her mind. You know, I think this happens with, with everything I've been in, through in my life. The initial step of any sort of crisis that, that's, when things aren't going your way, the first thing you want to do is put the brakes on and say, I don't like where this is going, hold on, wait a minute. But it doesn't. Life doesn't hold on and time doesn't wait, and people don't wait, they move on without you. So, you know, I was, I did try for a while to change her mind, and say, you know, this is a terrible mistake, like, it's, we can fix this. You know, I'm not going to, I, I, I can still forgive you, I can, I don't hate you for this. It can be repaired. But let's help, let's do it together. Like, let's, but my idea of fixing it was not the same as her idea of fixing it. So her idea was to carry on without me with my husband, obviously. And then you have this new series called Why Not with Shania Twain on OWN. Yeah. And I want, I want to talk to you about the concept, I got to watch a couple of episodes. Boy, you are really exposing yourself, Shania Twain. Which is, you know, I've interviewed, this is about the fifth or sixth time I've talked to you. This is more information than I've ever heard coming from you. I, you know, I'm taking, you know, the public on a journey, a personal journey through various things in my life, very, you know, various challenges and difficulties. And doing it in real time and in real, you know, on the bus and just doing things that I know are going to be uncomfortable, not knowing what the end result is going to be, and but forgetting about the end result and just diving in right there at that moment. So whatever, however this turns out, it doesn't really matter. It's not about how it turns out. It's about going through it. So it's about what you're experiencing at the moment, capturing that, and it's difficult to do that. I mean, I know we have all these reality TV shows and all that, but this is very different in the sense it's more of a documentary. So Fred, we call it the Fred cam, he, my husband Fred, he was able to capture a lot of things that, you know, you wouldn't normally be able to capture any other way. So it's almost like you're, you are going to get a lot of things of what happens after the cameras go home, you know, and it was very important, you know, to be able to express myself like that, even though, and it was the only way I could. You know what made me laugh? In a way, and it's twisted, but you're at your parents' gravesite with your sister. She puts the flowers one way, you're a control freak, you take the flowers off the grave and you put them in a different direction. I thought, boy, that's not a sister thing. I don't know what is. Isn't it? Right? Isn't that so true? It's so true, yeah. I know. But you guys talk about growing up poor. Yeah. And I would like to see, we're going to show a clip from the show just so we can identify some of the stuff that's coming from this new program, which is great. Let's watch Shania and her sister. I was here in grade one, six years old. Up to this point, that was the whole living room. Now there's six of us living in here, it's not that bad, really. This was the bedroom for the four of us. This just from me onto the stairs. Being a poor kid, I knew how to pretend I wasn't hungry when I was famished, to act like I wasn't cold when I was freezing. These walls, they might be better insulated now, but I can tell you, 20, 30 years ago, it wasn't. And, yeah. And her sister was his sister there. And violence. We talked about violence, too. You know, we had a very turbulent childhood. We had bouts and periods of turbulence, and so it was very inconsistent. You never really knew what was going to happen next. You know, my family struggled economically a lot, put a lot of pressure on both my parents, made my mother depressed, made my father have violent outbreaks. It's not an excuse, because I would never want to condone neglect and violence and all of those things. But I do think it's important to try to understand why it happens. And that's all a part of the journey. This is not about blaming or anger or anything like that, or even regret. It's about trying to understand, explaining everybody's position and what their roles are and how these things come about. Forgiveness in there? Forgiveness is in there, of course. But forgiveness is understanding. When you understand, you forgive. So you need to try to understand and learn as to why these things have happened to you. This is all part of what I'm going through, and it's great. It's also very much of a relief to be able to share it and to share that experience. Sharing the experience is even less about myself, because I'm already going through the experience, whether I share it or not. Sharing it is scarier, for sure, but the sharing it is really more about knowing that I'm not alone, knowing that I am not the only one that goes through these things. I mean, one child, I think it's one child a week dies from child abuse. I mean, it mightn't be one child a day, that's just in Canada. And they say that so many of these statistics don't even get reported. And why don't they get reported? Because everybody's too afraid to talk about it. And I certainly am one of those people, and so I learned from a very young age. I learned to act like I wasn't cold when I was freezing, and that I was fine when I was starving. Starving. And you learn how to hide all that. And that's carried on. And it's kind of carried through your professional life. Absolutely. Shania Kids Can, I want you to tell us about your charity, which I think is fantastic. Shania Kids Can. Right now, we're just getting started from the ground up, and I've got a couple of schools that I'm sponsoring with a program that tries to target, what I've done is I've tried to teach the educators to target, not to target me, that's not a good word, but for themselves to try to discover who the underprivileged children are in their classes, because kids are so good at staying under the radar. I know exactly what it's like to hide all of that. Because you're afraid, you don't want your parents to get exposed, you want to protect your family, you're embarrassed, and so you go to great lengths to hide all of this. And so these kids are out there now, every day in our schools. I believe that we spend more time as kids with our educators and in our schools, so why not start there, when you know, when they go home, they can't rely on relief there. So give them the relief within the school day. If you want to donate, visit ShaniaTwain.com. And then proceeds of your book are going towards the program as well. Yes, exactly. That's so great. Yeah. So, okay, now we've got so much to talk about and we have two minutes. Okay. So, let's talk about your voice. Sure. What are we doing about the voice? Now, you'll see through the series that I went through a lot of discovery about my voice. I won't go into it now, but I'm heading myself right into serious therapy and rehabilitation. It's going to take a lot of work. Okay. Yeah. New album? Not a new album yet, new song. New song. I wrote the song during the filming of the series. Right, I saw that. I was very excited. It was unintentional. I was petrified of writing a new song alone, but I did it. First time in a long time. And I'm very excited. But you used to do that by yourself anyway. Of course. But then when you've got a partner for all these years, you forget what it is to be independent. Yeah. You know, you really do. You said you didn't think you'd ever love again, but you sure love somebody who adores you. Yes, he so does. He's so handsome. And I'll tell you, just so you know, I was at the Junos and you walked right by me, which is okay. You look gorgeous. And you had your entourage. And I look back and there's Fred with the limo, talking to the security guy. Sure. And he looked over at you, making sure you're okay. Looked back at you. Everything's okay. And I thought, I like that guy. Fred's a lovely, lovely man. And he, I'm so spoiled rotten. I love it. It's a beautiful twist. Now, the other thing I want to say, how's your son? He's good? Asia's good? He's great. He's doing really, really great. He loves Fred. Asia's great. I mean, really, when I think of it, I think of it anyway, divorce is really sad and it's terrible. But my son will never go through what I went through in my life. He'll be fine. He's going to be just fine. And with all this information and one day he's going to read this book. Yes. Yeah. One day he will. He's too young right now for sure. Yeah. He's even too young. That's another major reason why I documented my life. Okay. Because he's too young for me to explain all of this trauma. Yeah. And what if I die tomorrow? Then he doesn't have my life. Well, I think we have to be realistic. You know, I'm realistic about it. It doesn't make me paranoid. But I'm realistic. You know, life throws curve balls. Now, one thing before you go. You look absolutely stunning. Do you go through the body image crisis that we go through? Hey, are you kidding? I write all about it in the book? I know. I struggle every day. Tell us about the girls. I mean, Fred is the one that tells me every day how beautiful I am. That's so nice. Thank goodness. That's so nice. You need to hear that. It's nice to know everybody does do that. Everybody does. So you need to hear that. You need to hear it. So I love having people around me to tell me that. It's a beautiful twist. Listen, so happy you're back here to visit us. I hope you can spend an hour with me next time. I do. I do as well. I really do. And I wish you all the very, very best. And we're super fans of Shania Twain. Everyone in the audience is going to get a copy of Shania's new book.