Coming Clean Shania Heals From Her Painful Past

How music, new love and her son saved the country star.

- Lisa Chambers

Like the title of her new album, Now, Shania Twain wants to live in the moment. And no wonder, since her past is so painful.

The country superstar grew up with abusive parents. “Many nights I went to bed thinking, ‘Don’t go to sleep, don’t go to sleep, wait till they are sleeping,’” she recalls of her youth. “I was worried about my father killing my mother, but my mum was quite violent too. I would wake up to make sure everyone was still breathing.”

Shania (52) has spoken about her traumatic childhood with her stepdad Jerry Twain, but following her bitter break-up of her marriage to music producer Robert “Mutt” Lange in 2008, she says, “I started peeling back the layers of pain I was in, and all the other griefs and disappointments came back to the surface.”