Tina Turner Reflects On Her Life: ‘I Was Meant To Survive’
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Tina Turner’s new memoir Tina Turner: My Love Story is out this week, and she’s been incredibly personal during her press tour.
As Entertainment Weekly notes, in the book she reveals her many health scares of the last few years — which include everything from vertigo to cancer to a kidney transplant — as well as her successful, late-arriving romance with husband, and music executive, Erwin Bach, a man 17 years her junior. She even tells fresh stories about her harrowing time with Ike, including one concerning her wedding night that she was too embarrassed to reveal two decades ago.
“Most people think of me as being in motion all the time, and I was,” she says of her illness. “Dialysis forced me to sit still for hours, which gave me a chance to think. I asked myself questions about painful subjects I often tried to avoid — [like] why did Ike behave the way he did? What was important to me in this life? Looking back, I realized that life has a way of turning poison into medicine, bad can turn into good.”
She also speaks of her insecurities about her body.
“My figure would not have turned one head in Nutbush, where I grew up,” she says. “Women were supposed to be curvy, not built like a pony, which is what I always thought when I looked at my long, dangly legs. I did the best I could with what God gave me — and the help of really good wigs and red lipstick! But being sexy was never my goal.”
She also said that while she tried to look sexy for men on stage, it was the women she was really performing for.
“Because we were a sisterhood,” she explained. “Me, my dancers, and our audience, out there having a good time together. I don’t like it when performers are overtly sexual. At my shows, I wanted wives, husbands, grandparents, children, friends, everyone, to have fun. And here’s something I always understood. If you appeal to the women in the audience, the men will follow.”
Read the full interview at Entertainment Weekly.