Cher: The Memoir, Part One

I have never been a particular follower of Cher and I don’t recall ever watching her television show(s) but there was something about the description of her recent memoir – as well as the way she has reinvented herself over the years – that intrigued me and caused me to put it on my Fall 2024 Reading List.

Here is the publisher’s hyperbolic description:

The extraordinary life of Cher can be told by only one person . . . Cher herself.

After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir.

Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center.

She is a longtime activist and philanthropist.

As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship.

With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono—and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.

Cher: The Memoir reveals the daughter, the sister, the wife, the lover, the mother, and the superstar.

It is a life too immense for only one book.

So when I saw it at the library recently, I checked it out and it sat on a windowsill for several weeks before I picked it up one night when I needed the proverbial “one chapter before I turn off the light.” It’s a fun and gossipy tome covering her life from 1946, when she was born in Southern California, her attempts to break into the music business starting when she left home at 16, her involvement with and eventual marriage to Sonny Bono, their stardom and failure of their marriage, her post-Sonny relationships, through 1976 when she gets divorced from her second husband, Gregg Allman. Maybe what piqued my interest was a CNN special I saw last year on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, which reminded me that the Allman Brothers’ fundraising for Carter and support of his campaign was pivotal in his election:

Dickey [an Allman Brothers guitarist/songwriter who had composed “Ramblin Man”) welcomed me to the “family” and told me about the band’s support for their Democratic governor, Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who grew up not far from Macon and shared the same values on civil rights. They’d raised the money that started his campaign. He was an honest-to-goodness civil servant, the polar opposite of some politicians who would sell their souls to keep their jobs. It was a long shot for him to reach the Oval Office, as America hadn’t elected a president from the Deep South since before the Civil War, but the band admired him and he’d become their friend.

Presumably what the reader of this book wants is this behind-the-scenes look at Cher’s life and career, and to understand how someone who seems self-confident and bold allowed herself to be manipulated by the men in her life, not to mention occasionally abusive or neglectful parents. Her mother made many bad choices in romantic partners, including reuniting with men she should have avoided, and Cher did the same, although her relationship with Sonny seemed healthier once they were separated and (two secret years later) divorced. However, the stories about her often impoverished upbringing are interesting and her message of resilience is probably appealing to her fans, as well as offering a counterpart to the Hollywood encounters and glitz. The book reads like a humorous conversation among friends, which is apparently how it was created. She shares her vulnerability and struggles but, at the same time, says people can take her or leave her; she makes no apologies for her slip ups (Sonny becoming a Republican congressman and pal of the Newt Gingrich has much more for which to atone, in my opinion).

Cher began writing this book in 2017 and I am impressed by her recall of who she ran into at parties and restaurants because the name dropping is certainly the most entertaining aspect of the book. She probably has recordings of her shows to remind her of all the VIP guests and what they all wore but the detail she provides is amazing. Cher got help from at several ghostwriters, particularly LA-based Yale graduate, Julia Leatham, Suzy Byrne reports:

“I did everything from memory,” she said of the process with ghostwriters. “We would just sit there. Julia [Leatham] would write everything. Mostly she let it be in my words. I have a distinct way of talking. … Sometimes I pause where you might not expect to pause or think it belonged, but that's just who I am.”

It’s a big book, 411 pages, and I wondered if the publisher originally planned for it to be two volumes or if the manuscript came in so enormous and full of juicy details that HarperCollins then decided to publish it in consecutive years.  It's not great literature but it was entertaining.

Title: Cher: The Memoir, Part One
Author: Cher
Publication: William Morrow, hardcover, 2024
Genre: Memoir/Nonfiction
Source: Library