Shania Twain on ex's affair: Accidents happen

It may seem hard to believe, but Shania Twain was able to forgive her ex-husband and best friend for their affair.

"Despite everything, I still loved my husband," the superstar singer says in her new memoir. "And I still loved my friend. I put myself in their shoes with the understanding that accidents happen, we're all human, and we all make mistakes....Eventually, I came to the point of accepting the end of my marriage."

Excerpts from Twain's new book, titled "From This Moment On," were published on Parade.com and give some insight into the dark days of the breakup of her marriage to famed producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange and her past as a witness of domestic violence.Discovering that her husband of 14 years and the father of her son had an affair with her best friend Marie-Anne was "the most shocking and painful truth of my life since the death of my parents twenty years earlier," Twain says.

"For the first week after finding out about the affair, I was ready to die–to go to bed forever and never wake up," the singer writes. "Or to hurt someone. I was ready to do something desperate, but in reality, there was nothing to do but to suffer through it. Fortunately, when you're a mom, the responsibility of caring for your child can keep you going."

Now happily married to Marie-Anne's ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, Twain reveals she grew up watching her stepfather physically abuse her mother.

"Jerry had her on the bathroom floor by the toilet, and, grabbing her hair, he slammed her head against the side of the basin, knocking her out cold," Twain says in her book. "I could see Jerry repeatedly plunge my mother's head into the toilet bowl, then pull it out again."

"I remember wondering, 'Why is he trying to drown her when she's already dead?' I wanted to scream, 'Stop, you already killed her!' I wanted to stop him, but I was too afraid...The enormity of that helplessness transferred to me, and I felt as limp as she was."

[Source : marquee.blogs.cnn.com]