Cher looks back on her ups and downs with Bono in her ‘Cher: The Memoir: Part 1,’ which hit shelves on Tuesday, Nov. 19
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Sonny Bono and Cher
Cher is looking back on her complicated relationship with Sonny Bono.
In her new book Cher: The Memoir, Part 1, out Tuesday, Nov. 19, the entertainment legend opens up about the downfall of their marriage.
Cher and Bono were 16 and 27, respectively, when they met. The pair rose to fame with their hit song “I Got You Babe” before finding success with their variety show The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. While they had an unofficial wedding in 1964, they actually got married in 1969. Despite their productive professional partnership, Cher writes that Bono was controlling — and she began to feel “trapped” in what she calls a “loveless marriage.”
In 1972, Cher was 26 and in Las Vegas for work with the mercurial Bono when she reached her breaking point, stepped onto her hotel balcony and looked down.
“I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear,” Cher, 78, writes. “For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times.”
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Cher
However, the thought of her loved ones — her then-young child Chaz, her mother Georgia and her sister Georganne — stopped Cher, who writes, “things like this could make people who look up to me feel that it’s a viable solution.”
In Las Vegas, she had an epiphany: “I don’t have to jump off. I can just leave him.”
Cher and Bono quietly separated soon after. They filed for divorce until 1974, before finalizing their contentious divorce in 1975 following a bitter custody battle of Chaz. Over the years, they remained amicable co-parents and even reunited professionally for The Sonny & Cher Show.
In 2023, Cher looked back on their relationship, telling PEOPLE that he “pissed me off royally and hurt me” but that they found peace.
“One day he came into the kitchen at my house and said, ‘Cher, I want to apologize. I realized that I hurt you in so many ways, and I was wrong,’” she said of Bono, who died in 1998. “That went a long way for me.”
HarperCollins
‘Cher: The Memoir: Part 1’ book cover art
Cher unveiled her two-part memoir in July. At the time, teased that the first installment would follow “her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono — and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.”
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in November 2023, Cher said that her life was “too immense for only one book.”
On Nov. 20, Cher will embark on a book tour that’s kicking off in New York City. Then, she’ll make stops in Englewood, N.J.; London; Beverly Hills, Calif.; and San Francisco.
