FAQ

Is this an authorised biography?

No. I prefer to describe it simply as: The Biography - my balanced interpretation on the life and career of Shania Twain. To me Authorised means that it has been written with the subject's blessing and that they can take out anything they don't like, true or not. On the other hand to me Unauthorised means that it is digging up all the dirt the author can find, something I am not interested in doing. This is my version of her truth, so I get to take both praise and blame.

Did Shania know you were writing the book?

Yes. Before I started my researches I met with Jon Landau, Barbara Carr and Jan Stabile from Shania's management company and explained what I wanted to do. At this point in her career Shania does not want to write an autobiography, though I am sure she will in years to come. Throughout the writing of the book I bombarded Jan and Shania's assistant Kim with questions. They were extremely helpful and Shania herself put me in touch with members of her family, old school friends and even an ex boyfriend.

I interviewed her twice for magazine articles I started the book. Our first meeting was at the Milestone Hotel in London in January 1998. I was the first British journalist to interview her for the Come On Over album. I spent two hours with her and we also chatted at length at a party thrown for her two nights later. The second time was also in London in October 1999. On that occasion Shania was in serious pain with a jaw complaint - "I can't chew anything," she told me, "I had some cookies earlier and I had to dip them in some tea and wait until they were soggy enough." - but we still talked for over an hour

How long did the book take ?

About a year. I did around 90 interviews either in person or on the telephone.

How did you research it?

Everyone researches in their own way. Where a person comes from is integral to their life. Because Shania comes from a different country and culture it was essential that I try to understand about Canada and Northern Ontario in particular. In some ways Canada is closer to Britain than to the USA, in others it is very alien. I read novels by Canadian authors like Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields, to imbibe some of the flavour. I visited Canada three times ( and Nashville once), driving thousands of kilometres over Northern Ontario in blazing sunshine, driving rain, and blizzards to interview people and just to see the houses she lived in as a child, bars where she gigged, the Native reserve she played on. It's a tough beautiful country which explains a lot about her . If nothing else I made some fine friends in Timmins and Toronto. Then I got down to the basics.

The Basics?

The facts about Shania Twain. Trawling through 10 years of press cuttings, previous biographies, whatever information I could glean about Mutt Lange. I did a lot of surfing the net for she is truly a child of the World Wide Web That enabled me to build a chronology which sometimes seemed at odds with the reported facts of her life. At the same time you always have to be on the look out for the confirmation of stories or blatant contradictions. People's memories get rustier with time and they can be out by years. Some newspaper reports and memoirs often disguise the fact that the person telling the stories was not in the room at the time but reporting what a third party told him. Incorrect facts and stories can be reported in a newspaper and then repeated so often that they become accepted as the truth.

Can you give an example ?

Shania was 22 when her parents were killed. A lot of reports still have her as 21, which means they couldn't be bothered to do some simple maths. Shania is supposed to mean "I'm on my way" in the Ojibway language but I could not find any Ojibway or Cree native who could confirm that meaning.