Cher: Part One: The Memoir (The Cher Memoir Book 1)

by Cher

Addiction doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops, and its unhappy consequences have been repeated with dreadful symmetry throughout my life.

At fifteen, she gave up her dreams of higher education, and out of a strange mix of pity, love, and duty, she went back to care for her father.

The women in my family rarely chose their men well and Jackie Jean was no exception, but with Lynda her sole role model, she stood little chance. Beneath his polished veneer, my father would become a heroin addict with a penchant for larceny and a shaky relationship to employment.

It was her body, her life, and her choice to make.

My fear of abandonment undoubtedly stems from being separated from my mother as a baby, and my inner drama queen has become an integral part of the complicated human being that is me.

She would tell me the same about marrying a rich man when I was growing up, and it’s where she got her belief that if you were beautiful, you deserved a man who’s loaded.

Having declared that men are “things you love against your will,” my mother was becoming a serial monogamist.

Most important, the only man I ever called Daddy loved me and treated me as his own. That was good enough for me.

That temper is a family curse and one I’m glad I didn’t inherit.

This constant unpredictability made me hypervigilant about the moods around me and gave me what I call a faulty emotional thermostat as I, too, began to swing between extremes.

I was always old beyond my years, maybe because I was treated like a grown-up from the earliest age.

I learned early that most adults were unpredictable, so I couldn’t count on them and had to be constantly vigilant. I never wanted a plain life, but a touch of normality was nice now and again.

might only have been a kid, but I’d already learned to compartmentalize sadness—something I became pretty good at later in life.

“Only when you’ve listened to what the person has said do you know how to say what you need to say.”

wasn’t love at first sight. I just thought this guy was special.

Thank God I have Cher. She is my stabilizer. She is my generator too. She’s my reason.

I wish I’d known how he really felt because I never would have guessed that in a million years.

It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become.

When you’re seventeen, what do you know about anything?

Years later somebody asked me if I left Sonny for another man, and I told them, “No. I left him for another woman. Me.”

wanted. I think he would eventually come to realize that I was the one who was always there for him, who loved him, and I think he loved me, just not enough to be faithful or kind.

The truth is, I knew Sonny better than anyone, but sometimes I didn’t know him at all.

I’ve said time and again there would be no Cher without Sonny, but obviously there would be no Sonny without Cher either.