I haven't yet read her newly released autobiography From This Moment On. Part of me is tired of all the books on cheating I've read. Part of me is tired about hearing of cheating. Good Lord, doesn't any married man keep his damn pants on these days.
However, so much of what Shania has said about discovering the affair – "I really was completely shocked... I didn't want to kill myself, but I didn't want to live" – was exactly how I, and many others, felt. Nothing protected her from the pain – not her beauty, her career, her money. She, like so many of us, desperately wanted to fill in the blanks, something neither her husband nor her friend, with whom he was having the affair, would do. "By...not knowing the details," she explains, "your imagination is left to run wild."
I give Shania Twain credit for sharing her story with the world. It can only help those of us who know her pain intimately to feel part of a wider community of women with the strength to get past such betrayal.
Now, if only I could write a hit-making country song about it....
