LOS ANGELES — Cher will turn back time and tell her life’s story in a two-part memoir — because the music icon has a life “too immense for only one book,” her publisher said.
The Grammy, Oscar and Emmy Award winner — who says she fought for more than 70 years to live her life on her terms — announced the release date Wednesday for her latest project, promising that her upcoming book will tell her true story “in intimate detail.”
“Cher: The Memoir, Part One” will hit shelves on Nov. 19. The second volume of the “If I Could Turn Back Time” singer’s tome will follow in 2025, said publisher Dey Street Books, an imprint of the William Morrow Group at HarperCollins Publishers.
“As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship,” Dey Street Books said.
“With her trademark honesty and humor, ‘Cher: The Memoir’ traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.”
The first installment will chronicle the “I Got You Babe” singer’s early childhood and meeting and marrying her Sonny & Cher partner Sonny Bono, the musician and Palm Springs congressman who died in a ski accident in 1998. Cher, who was married to Bono from 1964 to 1975, will reveal the “highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.”
The “Believe” singer — born Cherilyn Sarkisian — and Bono had one child, Chaz Bono, 55. She later had son Elijah Blue Allman, 48, with her second ex-husband, the late musician Greg Allman.
Her publisher said the memoir will also pull back the curtain on “the daughter, the sister, the wife, the lover, the mother, and the superstar.” The 78-year-old activist and philanthropist is a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, a Kennedy Center honoree and is the only woman to top the Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades.
In November, the “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” star joked on “The Tonight Show” that she “totally chickened out” and didn’t initially put in some tidbits in early drafts.
“But they need to be put in, so I have to go back and man up,” she said. “I’ve lived too long and done too much, and so it’s like it should be the encyclopedia.”
