It was just a year ago when Whitney Houston passed away at the young age of 48.

One of the greatest voices of our times lived in the spotlight as a singer, actress, mother, wife, daughter, and to lots of aspiring singers a mentor. To the world she was Whitney, but to her family, she was simply Nippy.

Perhaps one of the greatest pains a parent could have is burying their child, it’s always expected that the parent will go first.

For nearly a year Cissy Houston remained silent about her daughter’s untimely death, that’s until she sat down with Oprah Winfrey a few weeks ago. But an hour with the ‘Queen of Talk’ wasn’t enough, enter the memoir Remembering Whitney, My Story of Love, Loss and the Night Music Stopped.If you know anything about me it’s that Whitney Houston is my absolute favorite singer.

I read the book in two days and while there were a lot of things I was aware of, there were quite a bit I didn’t know, check them out.

Shaka’s 20 Most Shocking Revelations from Whitney’s Book

1.The name Nippy came from her daddy. He got it from a comic strip character who was always getting in trouble. Likewise, Whitney’s middle name Elizabeth was in honor of her paternal grandmother and Whitney came from an actress on television show her mom liked.

2.Whitney once lost a talent show to another young lady who ironically sang Greatest Love of All. Whitney came in second place and years later once she ‘made it’ ran into the lady again.

3.John Houston was still married to his first wife when he met Cissy (who had son Gary) from a previous brief marriage. It wasn’t until after Michael and Whitney were born that his divorce became final.

4.Bobbi Kristina almost ended up with the name “Tekatia or Takeka” according to Cissy, she suggested the name Christiana instead. “That child will have to carry that name through her whole life. You are not giving my grandbaby that name.”

5.It wasn’t Bobby Brown who introduced Whitney to drugs; it was her older brother Michael. (I never thought it was Bobby anyway, but didn’t know it was her brother) It was in the late 80s that Whitney’s long time friend/personal assistant Robyn Crawford came to Cissy about Whitney’s drug use. She told Cissy they both did drugs, but Whitney was addicted.

6.Whitney was an actress! Long before The Bodyguard, Waiting to Exhale and The Preacher’s Wife she had guest appearances on sitcoms. Silver Spoons and Gimme A Break were two mentioned in the book.

7.Remember the train wreck of a show Being Bobby Brown? Yeah, the reason there wasn’t a second season of it is because Whitney refused to be on so the producers didn’t want to do it without her.

8.Because Whitney refused to invite her dad’s new wife to her wedding to Bobby Brown, her dad refused to come. He eventually changed his mind saying he would come walk her down the aisle, but was leaving immediately afterward. He ended up staying.

9.A week before Whitney sang that unforgettable rendition of The Star Spangled Banner she was asked to record a “safety tape” kind of what Beyonce did right before the Inauguration. Whitney recorded the tape, but producers of the halftime show felt her version was too jazzy and asked her to do it over. Her father refused, “No, this is the way Whitney is going to sing the song. If you want her to sing it, this is it.” So there you have it. Whitney’s version of the Star Spangled Banner was not only unique and the best version to date, but she sang it LIVE… She told producers she couldn’t keep time with a song unless she was really singing it.

10.Whitney suffered a miscarriage in 1992 weeks after filming of The Bodyguard began. She was also secretly engaged to Bobby Brown, whom she married in July of that year.

11.Whitney and Bobby’s honeymoon was a ten day Mediterranean cruise, but Whitney didn’t want to go alone so she invited her brother Michael and wife Donna to come.

12.Remember the hit song “Shoop, Shoop” from the Waiting To Exhale Soundtrack? Well this is what happened. Babyface wrote the music and the first few lines of the song, then gave it to Whitney and asked her to do the rest. A week later Whitney didn’t have words for the song. As a joke she starting singing “Shoop, shoop” in place of words and everyone liked it so much Babyface wrote the rest of the song around it.

13.We all noticed the weight gain of Whitney during the last five yearsof her life, apparently the doctor prescribed steroids to help with her voice and it caused her to put on a few extra pounds.

14.During an interview with Essence magazine a writer asked Whitney her response to the public saying she wasn’t “black enough.” She responded, “What’s black?” I’ve been trying to figure this out since I’ve been in the business. I don’t know how to sing black and I don’t know how to sing white either. I know how to sing, music is not a color to me. It’s an art.”

15.The night Cissy found out Whitney died, she writes, “I didn’t know how I would make it through the next five minutes, let alone the rest of the night, or the long nights ahead. I didn’t understand how anyone could bear such a burden of sadness and pain. And then, someone put on music and I could hear the voice of Marvin Winans singing the great Andrae Crouch song. “God has spoken, so let the church say amen.”

16.Cissy also revealed something she’d never revealed about the day Whitney was born. A voice she heard as she held her baby girl in her arms. Cissy said she never said anything to anyone about it, and didn’t think about it again until February 11, 2012.

17.Cissy never liked for Whitney to say she was from “The Bricks” another term the projects New Jersey. She said her kids only lived there five weeks while she was on tour and they stayed with a family friend. “I guess in Nippy’s mind that gave her some street credit or something.” Cissy said it made her mad to hear Whitney say that. “You ain’t never lived in no damn projects! You ain’t from no bricks. You’re going to get a brick upside your head,” she’d tell her.

18.Cissy on Bobby, “Yet unlike a lot of people, I don’t blame Bobby for introducing Nippy to drugs or for the things that ended up happing to her, at the same time I also don’t believe he did much to help her…When it came to getting clean, he and Nippy never seem to be in the same place at the same time and that made the process much harder.”

19.The Preacher’s Wife movie almost didn’t happen because Bobby didn’t want her to take the role. Nobody knows why, but Cissy speculates that he was uncomfortable with her working so close to Denzel Washington.

20.Cissy confesses that she often wonders if Whitney loved her, if she was a good mother. She admits to being angry with Whitney, at the world and herself. “Was I a good mother? Was I too hard on her? And the worst one of all, could I have saved her somehow?