As a child, Twain didn’t enjoy performing live, but her mom was insistent, often dragging her out of bed for late-night shows at local bars after last call, when children were allowed in. “My mother really wanted me to be on the stage,” the Man, I Feel Like a Woman singer recently told The New York Times. “So she got me up there very, very young. Too young.”
A tomboy, she was more interested in playing football with her brothers than getting on stage, telling a family friend she wanted to be “a man” when she grew up.
Perhaps that was a reaction to the violence in her household; she’s described being touched inappropriately by a neighbor and witnessed her stepfather smash her mother’s head against a toilet and try to drown her.
After their 1987 deaths, she was left to care for her siblings, returning home from Toronto where she’d been trying to build a singing career.
“I fell apart, totally,” she said during a 2023 appearance on the Making Space with Hoda Kotb podcast. “I lost a very important foundation.”