Sonny Bono

Cher should stick to what she knows best

The worst celebrity memoirists write first-person Wikipedia pages. Like Michelangelo carving a beautiful posterior out of Italian Carrara marble, the best celebrity memoirists edit their lives into tawdry yet moving epics. When they work, celebrity memoirs are the Warhols of American literature. When they fail, they’re the literary equivalent of a CVS receipt: boring and destined for the trash. Cher: The Memoir, Part One falls somewhere in between. It takes a miracle to reach Cher’s narrative peak. For more than a hundred pages, she details her childhood criss-crossing America as her mom marries and divorces man after man. I lost track of how many jerks Cher’s mother married, but according to Google, she married six different men (Cher’s heroin-addict biological father twice).

Cher

‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher

From our UK edition

This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story. With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19 ‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep with anyone before marriage.