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The rise of Eminem, nearly three decades after the fact, can almost seem like it was inevitable. But the fact is that things easily might not have worked out—and Eminem might not even have survived his early struggles.

Before he found fame and fortune, Marshall Mathers lived in poverty and worked some tough, dead-end jobs. Ever since he was a teenager he had harboured dreams of becoming a rapper, but the reality of actually doing that was difficult.

When Em’s daughter Hailie was born, his desire to become a rapper smashed against the hard realities of having to provide for a child. He worked a lot during those days, with his boss from that period remarking to Salon in 2000 that, in response to his daughter’s arrival, he became a model employee.

“He didn’t want his daughter to grow up like he did, living from day to day and moving from week to week,” he said.

But even as he toiled, Eminem was still pining for a rap career—and it was starting to take shape, too. He had soon fashioned a new persona for himself, and it would be this character that ultimately brought him success. Slim Shady had arrived.

With the violent, hyperactive Slim Shady persona in place, Eminem really started to stand out and, eventually, be discovered by Dr Dre. He was on the path to stardom now, and his life would forever change.

During a conversation with MTV in 2002, Eminem reflected on this period after the interviewer brought up his song ‘Say Goodbye Hollywood,’ in which he raps “I gotta get up, thank God, I got a little girl / And I’m a responsible father, so not a lot of good / I’d be to my daughter layin’ in the bottom of the mud.” They wanted to know how serious he was about this idea that he’d be “layin’ in the bottom of the mud” without Hailie.

“I think that in a roundabout way she did save my life,” Em said. “I always had drive coming up and I always wanted to make it as a rapper. That was my dream. But when she was born, it was the reality of ‘I have to do this.’”

By his own telling, Eminem’s conviction to make it as a rapper, even as he struggled with poverty, was down to Hailie. He felt he needed to make it for her, because rapping was the only option on the table.

“I had nothing else,” he said. “I had no high school education. I want her to be able to grow up and look back on this and be like—whether people agree with it or not—‘My dad put me on a song. My dad wrote songs for me, my dad said my name all over the place.’”

Eminem wanted to provide for his daughter, in a way that his own absentee father had failed to do for him. That motivation was at the heart of his eventual success. “I want her to be able to look back in magazines and everything and just know,” he said of Hailie. “I don’t ever wanna be like my father was to me.”