File this under something that should have gone without saying: When it came time for the artist known as Cher to finish her memoir, she discovered she had too much material. Where to start? Decades before Madonna reinvented herself and Taylor Swift had eras, Cher had returns– triumph of decline in which it would reappear stronger, brighter and more resolute than ever. “It is a thousand times more difficult to return than to become,” she writes in the first volume of her autobiography, entitled – of course –Dear. And yet, something in his soul always seems to love a challenge. With a walking, singing eye roll, Cher never encountered an obstacle without theatrically raising her middle finger. Consider the dress she wore to present at the Oscars in 1986 after being snubbed for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s film. Mask: the black sequinned supervillain outfit, complete with cobwebs and bare midsection, that became known as her fuck the Oscars dress. Beaming bad-tempered, she worked her way into awards show history.

But much of that later schedule concerns the second volume, which is supposed to arrive next year. Dearwhich documents the four decades between her birth, in 1946, and the start of her serious acting career, in 1980, focuses on the essentials: where she comes from, who she Eastall the incidents that helped her become one of music’s most indelible mononyms. I guarantee that as you read, you will be able to conjure up in your mind the sound of his voice, velvety and sonorous. (“We couldn’t tell who was singing the baritone parts,” The New York Times note in 1988 about “I Got You, Babe,” his duet with Sonny Bono, “but you had the unsettling feeling that it probably wasn’t Sonny.” “) And probably his face too: his doll-like features, his sphinx-like smile, and black, black hair. But more than anything, Cher has become a model of daring and courageous survival over the years, and on that front, her memoir is awash in insight and rich in detail.

Dear – The Memoirs, Part One

By Dear

Dear is an invigorating read, peppered with caustic jokes and self-effacing anecdotes, but fundamentally frank. You may agree, this is not the time for nostalgia. (She doesn’t actually want to go back in time—forgive the cheap gag.) “Our story was a sad, strange story of Southerners coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes. “It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy… Resilience is in my DNA.” Her grandmother was 12 when she became pregnant by Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean; his grandfather Roy was a baker’s assistant turned bootlegger who beat his new wife, blackmailed his daughter for pennies over the bars where he drank, and once attempted to murder both of his children by leaving the gas stove on . For much of her childhood – she was born Cheryl Sarkisian but changed her name in 1978 – she was raised by nuns, after her father abandoned her 20-year-old mother. Later, her mother, who had a quiet acting career, had seven or eight husbands and two illegal abortions that nearly killed her. Although Jackie was a talented performer and luminously beautiful, “my mother missed out on several major acting roles because she refused to sleep with men who promised her a break,” notes Cher. The stepfather who was kindest to young Cher was also a nasty drunk, to the point that, even now, “I still can’t stand the sound of a belt coming out of my pants loops.” »

From her early childhood, Cher was a dynamo: she perpetually sang into a hairbrush, danced around the house, and peed her pants during a movie screening. Dumbo rather than missing a movie. She dreamed of being a star and, less conventionally, of discovering a cure for polio. (“When Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so upset,” she writes.) Because of her mother’s irregular relationships, she was constantly moving, all over the country. At 15, she was living in Los Angeles, where she describes being stared at by Telly Savalas in a photographer’s studio and spending a wild night or two with Warren Beatty. At 16, she met the man who would become her partner in every sense of the word: a charming young man of 27, divorced, a bit of a squirrel, named Sonny Bono. “He liked that I was quirky and nonjudgmental,” Cher writes. “I liked that he was funny and different. He was an adult without being too much, and I was a sixteen year old who lied about my age. Their relationship was platonic at first: when she found herself homeless, she moved in with him, the couple sleeping in twin beds next to each other, like characters in a 1950s sitcom .One day he kissed her, and that was it.

If Cher’s early life is a Steinbeckian saga of grim endurance, her life with Bono is a volatile album of life in 20th-century entertainment. Through Bono’s relationship with Phil Spector, she became a singer, performing backing vocals on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” When Cher and Bono formed a duo and became hugely famous in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe”, the American musical establishment first considered her too extravagant with her pants and furs, then, as the sexual revolution and rock music caught fire – too square. During her first fame, recently widowed Jackie Kennedy asked Sonny & Cher to perform for a private dinner in New York. Fashion editor Diana Vreeland had Cher photographed for Vogue. At a party in her hotel suite, Salvador Dalí explained to her that an ornamental fish she admired was actually a vibrator. (“I couldn’t let go of that fish fast enough.”) After confiding all the financial details of their partnership to Bono, she was stunned when he revealed they owed hundreds of thousands in back taxes , even as their musical success stalled.

Read: What Madonna Knows

“The memory of things past is not necessarily the memory of things as they were,” declared Marcel Proust in In search of lost time. Show business memoirs can be cruel: those of Al Pacino Sonny boy recounts a similarly dark childhood, but I struggle to think of another famous author so insistently on forgoing rose-tinted reminiscences. Cher wants you to know that for most people – and absolutely most women – the 20th century was not a cakewalk. She loved Bono and was the first to admit how enchanting their dynamic could be. But the partner she described was controlling, vengeful (he reportedly burned her tennis clothes after seeing her talking to another man) and incredibly insensitive. When she left him, she discovered that his contract was one of “involuntary servitude”: he owned 95% of a company called Cher Enterprises, of which she was an employee and never received a salary. (Her lawyer held the remaining 5 percent.) Their divorce was finalized in 1975, about a year after the women won the right to apply for credit cards in their own names.

Promoting her book, Cher said CBS Sunday morning“I didn’t want to give information, because you could go to Wikipedia (for that). I just wanted to tell stories. And so she does, but in a form that can’t help but double as a larger story – an account of everything women have endured (couch casting, financial ruin, public scrutiny humiliating) and for which they fought (authority over their own body). . Unlike her mother, Cher was offered, via carefully coded language, a legal abortion in her doctor’s office in 1975, at a time when her life was in flux. (Her second husband, musician Gregory Allman, was addicted to heroin and had abandoned her; she was about to return to work on his CBS variety show, also titled Dear.) “I had to be at work on Monday,” she recalled. “I needed to sing and dance. I had a child, a mother and a sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice and I knew what it was. It made it harder not having Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and was very grateful for my doctor’s compassion in giving me one. (Cher and Bono’s son, Chaz Bono, was born in 1969. By 1976, Cher and Allman had reconciled and Cher had given birth to Elijah Blue Allman.)

Gratitude. Compassion. Choice. What does resilience depend on, if not all three? We have to wait until the second volume to hear Cher’s account of her ups and downs in the ’80s and ’90s: her new acting career, her Academy Award for Best Actress for Dreamerhis turn to infomercials to make money after a serious bout with chronic fatigue syndrome, his self-tuned path with “Believe” to one of the best-selling pop singles of all time. But in Dearshe offers a convincing, ironic and fascinating account of what made her and what she was able to do in turn. “I always thought whether or not I got a break was a matter of luck,” she writes, adding, “These were the key moments that changed my luck.” But this reading of things underestimates her sheer force of will – her categorical refusal, as with the Oscar dress, to ever be considered.