Cher, Part One

Starred review from December 13, 2024

Few celebrities have held the public's devoted fascination as long as Cher. Her engaging, outrageously honest, and surprisingly introspective memoir lives up to her legend and is packed with revelations. Her mother's early life is a tale of severe poverty and rampant family addictions. "Addiction doesn't just run in my family, it gallops," she writes. At 15, Cher dropped out of high school. She met Sonny Bono in 1962 when she was 16, and their musical partnership began. Although they told the public they married in 1964, they quietly wed in 1969. They had five singles in the top 20, something only Elvis Presley and the Beatles had accomplished. "Becoming famous is hard, but making a comeback is almost impossible," writes the queen of the comebacks. The duo recreated themselves from kooky singers to suave Las Vegas entertainers to TV stars. After their divorce, she continued hosting their TV show with Sonny--while pregnant by her second husband, Gregg Allman. This first volume of the memoir ends in 1980, just before Cher morphed into an award-winning film star. VERDICT Impossible to put down, this rollicking memoir is well-written, thoughtful, and will have readers eager for the second volume.--Kevin Howell

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 16, 2024
The glitzy and forthright first installment of Cher’s two-part autobiography finds the Grammy- and Oscar-winning performer pulling out more than a few secrets from her Bob Mackie–designed sleeves. The narrative begins with a detailed account of Cher’s rocky 1950s Southern California childhood before covering her struggles with dyslexia, the early radio hits she cut in Los Angeles, her marriages to Sonny Bono and Greg Allman, and the many famous faces she mingled with in the 1960s and ’70s. It ends with Francis Ford Coppola asking Cher why she isn’t acting, setting the stage for a part two that includes peeks at her film work in Moonstruck and Mermaids. Throughout, Cher is a recognizably frank, occasionally profane narrator (the text contains 42 f-bombs), but it’s her tenderness that shines brightest—especially moving is her determination to remain friends with Allman even after the end of their tumultuous, addiction-blighted marriage. She’s also a gleeful dispenser of top-shelf gossip, with juicy nuggets on everyone from Mick Jagger to Carol Burnett to Salvador Dalí (Cher attended a memorable dinner at the surrealist’s house, alongside a “bra-less chick” who “came out wearing a see-through blouse that might as well have been Saran Wrap”). Even casual Cher fans will be entertained.

Starred review from January 15, 2025
The diva recounts the action-packed first half of her life story, an all-American rags-to-riches dream. Like Barbra Streisand, this iconic woman, born in 1946, is going to need about a thousand pages to tell the story of her amazing life and career--but she has chosen to do it in two volumes. This one ends about eight years before she won her Oscar forMoonstruck in 1988, but having started her partnership with Sonny Bono at the age of 16, there is plenty to cover. She begins at the beginning: "I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn't make it up." Though Cher grew up with sour milk, ants in the Rice Krispies, and saddle shoes held together with rubber bands, her mother always won the "misery Olympics" with stories of her own past: "Did your dad ever try to gas you in your sleep?" Georgia Holt, this beautiful man-eater actress mom, was married six times (twice to Cher's "smooth-talking Armenian father," Johnnie Sarkisian), and Cher's relationship with her, which included quite a bit of difficulty over the years but always landed on love, seems to presage her history with Bono. He died in 1998, creating an opportunity for affecting candor and self-reflection about their trajectory, which included a divorce on the basis that "Sonny had held me in 'involuntary servitude, ' in direct violation of the US Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery." Their comedy act continued to thrive after their split: She loved this man, and always will. The story of Sonny & Cher is a story of the '60s and '70s, of the growth of the music and television industries, of fashion and celebrity culture, of the evolving role of women in the 20th century. And the skinny on her relationships with music mogul David Geffen, second husband Gregg Allman, and Kiss frontman Gene Simmons is just as riveting. "We talked so long on the phone he ended up with a $2,800 phone bill," she writes of Simmons. "That's when he blurted out that he loved me....What is it with these men?" The vicarious experience of wealth, glamour, and romance is rarely this much fun. A truly great celebrity memoir.

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