Review: Cher; The Memoir, Part One

Riveting, inspiring and insightful, the first volume of Cher’s memoirs offers the right amount of 1970s and ’80s nostalgia.

“Cher, what the f*** are you doing? They are just going to dinner,” Cher would ask herself as her parents left her with Maria, a Mexican babysitter. As a child, she had known that she was “overreacting a gargantuan amount” when she rolled on the floor and cried as her parents left. As an adult, she admits it was the result of severe abandonment issues that she developed in her formative years. Known for her iconic outfits, contralto voice and also for being mother to thousands of gay men, Cher is a queer icon whose memoir serves and how!

Cher singing at the Super Bowl in Miami, Florida, USA, on 31 January 1999. (HT Photo)

In the initial chapters, she uses her razor-sharp memory to trace her family’s history and also take readers through the many historical events that shaped the 20th century including the Great Depression, the polio outbreak (at one point, Cher says she felt like an angel sent by God to cure polio), and the Cold War.

Through her narration, it is clear that the Believe hitmaker not only has the memory of an elephant but also a high level of self-awareness. In Chapter 2, entitled “A dream is a wish your heart makes”, the American pop icon admits that her ability to compartmentalize thoughts has saved her life. She recalls a heartbreaking incident: In the middle of her make-up routine just before going on stage for a sold-out performance, her grandmother’s friend revealed that she, Cher, had been abandoned by her mother not once but twice.

She was devastated. “F*** the blows keep coming,” she writes with the sadness of a child raised in an abusive family. The generational pressure on the women of her family to use their beauty to marry rich wreaked havoc on their well-being. “It is easy to fall in love with a rich man, as it is a poor man,” her grandmother Lyndra told her. Cher says it is easy to believe this “especially when your own mother sets you up”.

480pp, ₹608; Dey Street Books

The loneliness of her childhood is palpable. Sam and Pete, two stubble-faced truck drivers, were her best friends as a child. She would go on picnics with them. Of course, her mother was worried -- because the men were entirely imaginary. The child Cher would often retreat into her internal world, sharpening her imaginative and creative prowess and conjuring fantasy friends. Her first tryst with music was the Song of the Witches from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “The spooky chicks looked cool,” she writes.

Besides her exceptional ability to analyse her past, Cher’s wisdom also shines through. This clearly comes not just from processing trauma in an emotionally healthy way, but by living a long, fruitful life.

In the prologue, she describes a scene in an auditorium where thousands of teenage girls screamed hysterically as a pink shirted and chest-hair-flaunting Elvis Presley gyrated on stage. His hyper masculine persona and raw sexuality, in Cher’s words, gave “nightmares” to mothers of young kids. As for Cher, she not only dreamt of being Mrs Presley one day but also sulked that Elvis would be too old to marry her by the time she grew up.

Unlike the usual celebrity memoir that reveals little, Cher has no qualms about talking about her encounters with other famous personalities. Heart-warmingly, she expresses love for “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll” Tina Turner. She also writes about how, at the peak of her fame in 1972, her marriage to singer Sonny Bono reached breaking point and almost drove her to self-harm. The memoir shows just how difficult it is to walk out of an abusive relationship. “I’d been beaten as a kid,” she writes, “and I wasn’t going to be beaten as an adult. Staring into Bono’s 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.”

In the privacy of her dressing room, Tina Turner, also in a long abusive marriage with Ike, asked how she had managed to leave Bono. “I just walked out and kept going,” she said.

A thorough empath, she explains that she uses her child Chaz Bono’s old, pre-transition name only with permission. “Chaz has granted his blessing for this usage. In the next volume, at the appropriate point, I will refer to my son as Chaz”, she writes.

Riveting, inspiring and insightful, Cher: The Memoir, Part One offers the right amount of 1970s and ’80s nostalgia while also being very relevant in the contemporary context. Cher is as good a writer as she is a singer and musician. The raw emotion, candid confessions and no-holds-barred accounts of her childhood will move you to tears. This is one of those rare celebrity memoirs that has earned a follow-up volume.

Deepansh Duggal writes on art and culture. Twitter: @Deepansh75.