Shania Twain: ‘Menopause has been very good for me’
The queen of country pop (and leopard print) couldn’t face looking in the mirror. Now 60 and playing with Harry Styles at Wembley, she talks about the car crash that killed her parents, marrying her PR’s ex-husband and falling back in love with her body
By Megan Agnew | The Sunday Times | June 13, 2026
Shania Twain had to be carried off stage at the Zappos Theatre in Las Vegas. She had torn two muscles in her thigh and bruising was developing quickly, blood pooling beneath the skin. “I was malnourished,” she says. “To be thinner.”
It was 2019 and the Canadian megastar was partway through her Let’s Go! residency, strutting on stage every night in an extravagant collection of outfits. There was the pearl-pink sequin robe with the leotard underneath, the fuchsia showgirl minidress and the black gown with a slit so far up the leg that it ended at her waist.
Behind the costumes, however, the singer known for extolling the best aspects of femininity was being confronted by her own changing womanhood. “In menopause you lose control of your body,” Twain says. “So all of a sudden I’m bloating and I’m definitely not in control. I can’t just lose five pounds.”
In her dressing room, before walking on stage to 7,000 people, “I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. I hated my body. I’m, like, ‘Oh, I cannot stand this changing body.’ But that was so unhealthy. Who cannot look at themselves in the mirror?”
She exercised vigorously and cut out fats and sugars. “I was doing very unhealthy things,” she says. “And I was working my body more than I was feeding it, to keep up with the strain.” It exacerbated her thigh injury and slowed her recovery. She knew she had to assess her lifestyle, change her mindset and be gentler on herself. “Now I’m, like, bring on the mirrors, I’m going to look at myself all day long!” she says with a laugh, her voice raspy. “Menopause has been very good for me because I’ve learnt that some things you cannot control.”
Twain has been very successful for a very long time. She was 26 when she left northern Ontario, Canada, for Nashville, Tennessee, desperate to escape the memories of a brutal childhood and her grief over the deaths of her mother and stepfather in a car crash in 1987. Her 1995 breakthrough album, The Woman in Me, was an infectious blend of pop and country music that has now sold more than 20 million copies. Its follow-up, Come on Over, in 1997, sold twice that amount. It is still the bestselling studio album by a female solo artist. Twain is the bestselling female artist in country music history and the recipient of five Grammys, two World Music awards and 39 BMI Songwriter awards.
Now, at 60, she is enjoying a hot chick renaissance. In 2024 she began her third residency in Las Vegas and performed in the Sunday Legends slot at Glastonbury to a crowd draped in leopard print and cowboy hats. Last year she joined the pop pocket rocket Sabrina Carpenter on stage at a festival in Austin, Texas, for a rendition of her hit That Don’t Impress Me Much. She is currently opening for Harry Styles at his Wembley Stadium shows in front of 90,000 people and on July 24 she will release Little Miss Twain,a new album that is her most sentimental yet. Twain is ready to go — yet again.
“I’m not slowing down,” she says, “and I’ll tell you why.” Twain lives between Switzerland and the Bahamas, and has other homes in Las Vegas and Canada, but I am meeting her in Los Angeles, where her 24-year-old son, Eja (pronounced “Asia”), lives. She, of course, looks great, wearing a denim shirt, dark jeans, suede boots and a wide-brimmed hat, moving around the Peninsula hotel like a high priestess of celebrity. Her entourage leads us to a private dining room to talk alone.
“I just keep finding new things that I love to do,” she explains. “I’ve got a genuine explorer’s heart and I haven’t run out of things to explore. And maybe I will No!” she corrects herself, “I never will. I mean, come on, there’s always a new flower, new recipe, new horse — there’s always something new.”
Twain is disarmingly sincere and seemingly fearless. She listens to each of my questions, nods once — and then sets off on her answer. There are moments when I anticipate a flinch but it never arrives.
Little Miss Twain is her seventh studio album, an account of her childhood and teenage years, when she was not yet “Shania”, the stage name she chose because record label executives felt her real name, Eileen, didn’t have sufficient star power. The album moves between classic country ballads and a more soulful Motown sound, with a couple of more pop-leaning numbers. “Honey, you’re going to go far,” she sings in the title track, “I’m going to be a star.”
“There was a whole gap in the story that’s now closed,” she explains. “I wrote an autobiography several years ago [in 2011] and that was a more cathartic experience. That was more of a deep dive emotionally. I went down some rabbit holes and I sorted some things out in my own mind and in my own heart.”
Twain was born Eileen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, the middle of three sisters. Clarence Edwards, a railway engineer, whom she describes as her biological father, left when Twain was two, after which their mother, Sharon, moved the family to Timmins, a rural goldmining town with not much left to mine. Sharon married a forestry worker, Jerry Twain, and they had a son, Mark, and adopted Jerry’s nephew Darryl.
Life was tough. Twain often went hungry, at times eating mustard sandwiches — she longed to be a “roast beef family”— and suffered frostbite during minus 30C winters. Home was often violent, with Twain living in fear that her stepfather, who had adopted her and her two sisters, would kill their mother. Once, when Twain was 11, Jerry beat Sharon unconscious and then repeatedly plunged her head down the lavatory. Twain smashed a chair across his back and he retaliated by punching her in the jaw. At other times Jerry made Twain walk around the house topless and sexually abused her. She has said previously that she forgave her parents at the time and that the abuse was a result of their acute circumstances.
“There were a lot of moments when I realised that I definitely would never allow myself to be in a violent relationship,” she says today. “I was already establishing my own shield and my own confidence in defending myself. I was watching a mother that didn’t do that for herself and I was not going to be my mother. I tried to protect her, I was sad for her, but the only thing that I really could do was break the cycle myself.”
Sharon was often bed-bound, sunk by bouts of deep depression. She did get up, however, to hear her daughter sing. “She lived vicariously through my music,” Twain says. “If she heard me writing a song in my room she would come and listen at the door. For her, it was a way out.” Yearning to escape to Nashville, Twain “didn’t want to depend on others to get me where I wanted to go”. She had never seen the ocean, let alone left the country.
From as young as eight, Twain would sing in bars after last orders — minors were forbidden from performing while alcohol was being served unless they had a licence, which Twain did not . Her mother would get her out of bed and put her on stage for the midnight set. She hated it. “I was stuck in places I didn’t want to be,” she says. “Smoke-filled bars, strippers coming off stage You’re very vulnerable.” It triggered a long battle with stage fright that she only conquered in her forties. “As a child I was, like, ‘I should not be here.’ It just didn’t feel right and it was stressful. I didn’t enjoy being a child performer, forced out and onto the stage.”
Twain soon learnt to cover up, wearing two bras and dressing in boys’ clothes. “I had to really watch how much skin I showed because the men were drinking, I’m in a bar setting, they maybe don’t realise that you’re younger than you are, they get touchy, bar managers get touchy, they cross the line,” she says. “So I learnt very young to never invite, by any means, any man into my personal space.”
Twain graduated from high school in 1983 and split her time between Toronto and Timmins, intent on launching a serious music career. But at 22 she received a phone call. Her parents had been killed in a head-on collision with a logging truck on an Ontario highway.
“Just, that’s it. Done,” she says. “I remember feeling really ripped off, like this is a double whammy rip-off of the universe. I was angry.” She had to raise her three younger siblings, her sister Carrie-Ann and the two boys — “my kids” as she often calls them — and found a job performing at a resort, now the breadwinner.
It was only after her siblings left home that she sent a demo tape to a friend in Nashville and, in 1993, signed a deal with Mercury Nashville. “I was very, very ready,” she says. “There was no going back. Put on your big girl pants, you have no more parents, you have no family support, no financial support, everything you own is in your vehicle. So make it work and suck it up.”
Nashville was an industry town, a machine that ran on old relationships and macho handshakes. “I was very self-sufficient and confident in my convictions,” she says, laughing. “But I had to learn the ways of the town.” She also realised she could embrace her sexuality in her music videos and on stage — full leopard print, crop tops, vampish hoods. “All of a sudden I was stepping out of myself and it was like a lightbulb,” she says. “I’m thinking, fuh-ree yourself! What are you waiting for? And wow, it’s so much more fun being a woman when you’re a performer.”
Although her first album didn’t take off, the next two went stratospheric. “I got famous very quickly,” she says. Not everyone approved. Many country music fans were appalled that a woman could be so assertive in her lyrics. Others in the industry were scandalised by her bombshell outfits, better suited to MTV than the deeply conservative values of country, and sniffy about her injection of pop music to the genre. In 1995 the singer-songwriter Steve Earle called her “the highest-paid lapdancer in America” (tonight Earle plays the Lyric Theatre in Stuart, Florida, capacity 500).
“I was meeting the industry for the first time, but not men. I was very experienced there — I was not intimidated at all by men,” she says. “I was not in charge but I was definitely not a pushover and I would not be bullied by any man or anyone. Period. I’d been through too much already in life. Nothing anyone did or said intimidated me at all. It only taught me.”
Twain blasted the same power and celebration of womanhood through her songs — Man! I Feel Like a Woman!, That Don’t Impress Me Much, Any Man of Mine, If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask! — right down to the punctuation. She is still upheld as a feminist icon. Does she feel like one?
“I don’t see myself as a feminist,” she says. “I see myself as a very independent thinker and not necessarily because I’m a woman. I am referred to as a feminist. I think I have a lot of feminist points of view because I am so defensive of the vulnerable woman, I really am.”
What is it about the word she finds so difficult? “I just feel that I’m strong as a person. It’s like saying, ‘You look great for your age.’ ” That it undermines her strength? “I feel it does. I’m not strong for a woman. I’m not independent for a woman. I’m not self-sufficient for a woman. I just am a woman. And this falls on boys too,” she says. “It’s, like, ‘Oh, the boy needs less protection than the girl because he’s a boy.’ That is so not true and it’s not fair. Vulnerable men…” she taps her fingers on the table with each word, “need just as much protection as vulnerable women.” Two taps again.
Twain will email me via her publicist in the days after we speak, still thinking about what she said about feminism. “It’s a tricky word for me, as growing up for so many years the word had so much negativity and confusion around it that I didn’t personally proclaim myself as a feminist,” she writes, “even though when I look at the values and morals of what a feminist is, of course I align with them.”
In April 1993 the producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who had worked with AC/DC and Def Leppard, heard Twain’s first album and called her to ask if they could work together. They met at a Nashville music festival in June and were married by December. Lange went on to co-produce and co-write her next three albums, all of which went multiplatinum.
In the late 1990s the family moved to Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, “somewhere I could forget who I was”, Twain says. “We were both very happy to be alone for weeks and weeks on end and not see anybody else. We just thought that was perfectly normal.” Their son, Eja D’Angelo Lange, was born in 2001.
Two years later, while on tour to promote her fourth album, Twain’s career was derailed. She was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease, an infection that caused damage to the nerves that control her vocal cords. She feared she would never perform again and took a 15-year hiatus from singing. Experimental open-throat surgery in 2018 brought her voice back, though the nerves are permanently damaged.
In Switzerland, Twain hired a personal assistant named Marie-Anne Thiébaud who became a close friend and confidante. In 2008 Lange suddenly announced he wanted a divorce — he was having an affair with Marie-Anne. Twain was furious and heartbroken. In her memoir she describes reaching a point where she wanted to die. “There was a time I was desperate for revenge,” she sings on her new album. “I hope I never hate that way again.”
Has she let go of the rage she felt for her ex-husband and best friend? “Oh definitely. I’ve always been pretty good at letting go of things and moving on, but some things are a little harder to move on from than others,” she says in a singsong voice, her eyebrows raised. “I would never dare say to anybody, ‘Get over it.’ But the burden that we carry, the weight of hate and anger is so great and I don’t wish it on anyone. It’s a terrible burden to carry around.”
Twain found consolation in Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric, a Nestlé executive, who was also recovering from the betrayal. “Something happened in me that I did not expect,” he said in the 2011 documentary series Why Not? With Shania Twain. “I fell in love with her.” The two were married in 2011.
Fred, who now works on Twain’s management team, is a total Swiss hunk (tall, model looks, mop of curly hair) and they are clearly besotted with each other. His Instagram profile is filled with photos of his wife on stage, posted with red-hot flame emojis. “Honestly, through the eyes of Fred, I am the hottest woman on the planet,” Twain says, eyes glassy. “To Fred, I’m the best cook, best mom, best wife and I feel the same about him.” They do most things together, she says. “I don’t want to be without that, I don’t want to be without that person. With Fred, I can just be with Fred.”
Both couples shared responsibility for bringing up Fred and Marie-Anne’s daughter, Johanna, and Eja, who is now pursuing a career as a music producer in LA. What was it like being a mother in such a different environment to her own upbringing? “It’s been a real pleasure to not have to struggle financially while raising my child,” she says. “It’s a luxury that I do not take for granted. But I don’t burden him with that. I don’t say, ‘Well, when I was your age…’ It’s not his fault. His life is not a life of financial struggle, so let’s not pretend that it is.” She adds: “Where money brings benefits, enjoy it, please! I worked hard for it!” She throws her head back and laughs. “I’m not going to make you suffer.”
Twain has what she describes as a simple life in the Swiss town of Corseaux. A keen cook, she plans dinner from the moment she wakes up. She clips stems from her rose garden to fill her vases, writes music late into the night and rides her three horses, sometimes at 3am, bareback and barefoot. “I’ll sit with them in the stall or lie with them or if they’re out on the paddock, then I will literally get on the fence and get on their back.”
At 60 years old, Twain is still strutting forwards with her career. She says she feels like an aunt to the heart-throb Harry Styles. What do they do when they hang out? “Well, we don’t ‘hang out’,” she says immediately. “Neither of us has time. We’re very busy.” Having met backstage at one of his concerts, Styles asked Twain to be his surprise guest when he headlined Coachella in 2022. “He knows who I am from his childhood,” Twain says. “His mother always played my music. I would never have imagined that I would be hearing these scenarios because I wouldn’t have projected myself that far into the future.” She adds: “But well, of course, the fans grew up! So that’s Harry Styles’s story. That’s Sabrina Carpenter’s story. It’s Taylor Swift’s story.”
Are Twain’s fans witnessing a new chapter in her career? “I’m sure that people look at my photos from when I was in my thirties, and now I’m in my sixties and you can see I’m different,” she says. “This is my 60-year-old menopausal self and I have been through these phases and now I’m, like, yeah! I’m very happy to be myself. Bring it on.”
The album Little Miss Twain is released on July 24.
