In the preface to volume one of Cher’s memoir, she gives us a heads up on the kind of story that is to follow. “Often when I think of my family history,” writes the 78-year-old superstar, “it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel.” Cher, an Emmy, Grammy and Oscar winner, isn’t known for the modesty of her statements, but in this case she isn’t exaggerating. The book, which takes us up to the 1980s and the beginning of her acting career, is so fraught with drama, danger and reversals in fortune that it unfolds like an American picaresque.
One thing that has always elevated Cher above the vast majority of people in her fame bracket has been her ability to poke fun at herself. The voice of this memoir, which has somehow survived seven years of rewrites and many fired ghostwriters, sounds at least as authentic as her outbursts on X. The young woman in these pages is bouncy, guileless, sardonic, flip – as keenly sensitive to her own absurdity as she is to that of others. “Oops,” she writes, when something bad happens. Of her entry into the music business: “I was utterly clueless.” Her wide-eyed enthusiasm survives early success so that, years into her celebrity, she still exclaims, “I felt like a million dollars!” after getting herself a new dress.
She is, in other words, a fun companion on a journey that beneath the jolly exterior contains a lot of dark and frightening episodes. Cher describes her family origins in the backwoods of Missouri, where her great-grandfather, Isaac, worked on the railroad and her grandmother, Lynda, was sent to relatives because her family couldn’t afford to keep her. In her early teens, Lynda met a man called Roy Crouch and in 1926 gave birth to Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean, at the age of 13. It was a bad start and went mostly downhill from there. “Resilience is in my DNA,” she writes, and you believe it.
Growing up as Jackie Jean’s daughter (Cher’s mother changed her name many times so that when she died in 2022, at the age of 96, she was Georgia Holt) was a complicated business. Holt married and divorced seven times, twice to Cher’s father, Johnnie Sarkisian: “The women in my family rarely chose their men well.” When Cher was a baby, Sarkisian abandoned the family, and she was briefly put in an orphanage in Scranton, Pennsylvania, run by nuns who didn’t want to return her. She got her Armenian looks from her father’s side of the family, but that’s about it.
She writes about these events in a clear-eyed, chatty style that feels like an aesthetic or perhaps even a moral choice. Holt held her own terrible childhood over her daughter’s head, withholding comfort and upstaging every hardship with her own stories. “She’d win the misery Olympics with something like ‘did you ever sing on the top of a bar for 16 cents when you were five?’… or ‘did your dad ever try to gas you in your sleep?’” Cher took note of this attitude and deliberately chose something different. And so, while she changed school every five minutes, wore shoes held together with elastic bands, and witnessed her mother leave one husband to take up with his brother, she files it all under: “I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn’t make it up.”
You can call this evasive, but I find it admirable, and it certainly yielded results. In 1962 she was living in LA with her family and had enrolled in acting classes when, across a crowded coffee shop, she spotted Sonny Bono, a two-bit musician singing backup for Phil Spector and trying to make it as a songwriter. They hit it off instantly and she moved into the 27-year-old’s apartment at the age of 16, insisting in the book that a) he thought she was 18, and b) they were just roommates until she was legal. In any case, the combination of Sonny and Cher would eventually launch the pair into pop stardom and form the basis of the latter’s extraordinary career. At Sonny’s behest, she ditched acting and threw herself full-time into music.
There is a lot already on the record about Sonny’s controlling behaviour, but it’s shocking when you get down into the details. They hadn’t been together long when, one evening, she mildly remonstrated with him about something and he spun around and pushed her up against the wall. “I’d been beaten as a kid,” she writes, “and I wasn’t going to be beaten as an adult. Staring into his eyes, I said, ‘Let me tell you something. If you ever touch me like this again, I will leave your ass and it’ll be the last time you ever see me.’” What’s curious about this episode is that, while Cher stamped out Sonny’s physical bullying that night, it would take her decades to escape his emotional – and, as it turned out, financial – abuse.
First, however, success. In 1965 the pair’s single I Got You Babe rose to the top of the charts and suddenly Sonny and Cher were famous. They hung out with the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys; they bought and sold mansions. (Sonny had occasionally to be reminded to pay the pair’s taxes and more than once they were financially wiped out). Cher reminds readers that, even then, she and Sonny weren’t everyone’s cup of tea. In 1965 they played a gig at the Hollywood Palladium that a visiting Princess Margaret hated so much she asked the venue to turn the volume down. A year later, they played the Hollywood Bowl at the top of the bill, with the Mamas and the Papas supporting them. “For the gig I wore my yellow plastic trouser suit with my white Beatle boots.” As a portrait of an era, this part of the book is pure joy.
But as they grew more successful and had a baby, Chastity, together, Sonny’s coercion increased. When she took up tennis, he became so jealous of her interactions with other men at the club that he burned her sports gear in an incinerator on their property. He wouldn’t let her see friends. He controlled the cashflow and work schedule, rarely giving her a day off. Their pop career died, TV taking its place. When Cher ran into Lucille Ball, she writes: “I told her, Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you’re the only one I know that’s ever been in this same situation. What should I do? She told me, ‘fuck him, you’re the one with the talent.’” Years later, the episode found an echo when Tina Turner appeared with Ike as a guest on Cher’s show and in the privacy of a dressing room quietly asked her: “How did you leave him?” Cher replied: “I just walked out and kept going.”
Throughout all this, Cher doesn’t hang around for analysis. She is brisk and brutal in stating the facts, and eventually leaves Sonny, takes up briefly with David Geffen, has a son with Gregg Allman, and begins a new phase of life. “There are a million people more talented than me who struggle to make it and will never be famous,” she writes. “I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck.” I’m sure Cher can be as nightmarish as the next global superstar, but in the moment this humility rings true. We leave Cher in her early 30s with an acting career, a child whose coming out she will catastrophically fumble, and an ascent to icon status as a solo artist ahead of her. I can’t wait for the next instalment.
• The Memoir: Part One by Cher is published by HarperCollins (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
