Howard BooksIt’s been nearly twenty years since Sara Evans topped the chart with her CMA Award-winning hit, “Born to Fly.” Now, the inspirational title takes wing again, as the ACM Top Female Vocalist releases her autobiography of the same name.
However, the Missouri native admits she initially had reservations about putting her life down on paper.
“At first I thought, ‘I don’t want to write an autobiography. The kids are too young,'” Sara tells ABC Audio. “And I didn’t think that I could write it to where it would be juicy enough.”
“So I initially wanted to write a book about, sort of, unsolicited advice,” she explains, “Like, ‘I don’t know how she does it, raising kids on the road, having this career, being a stepmother to four, being a wife, trying to be everything to everyone.'”
But Sara soon figured out that advice and autobiography work hand-in-hand.
“The more we wrote the book, the more we realized, ‘Well, I need to tell some stories about my life that will relate to the advice,'” she recalls. “Because otherwise, why am I just giving advice if I’m not talking about [the fact that] I went through hard times, this is how my mother raised us?”
Finally, Sara dismissed her co-writers and tackled the project herself.
“I sat down with a computer, rewrote the whole book,” she reveals. “And I love it so much more than what it was initially, because it was just not — it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t in my voice.”
“This book is like me just sitting down with you and telling you about my life,” she adds. “And if we had, y’know, five hours to sit over dinner, this is what I would accomplish telling you.”
Born to Fly is new in stores and online today.
By Stephen Hubbard
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