Cher’s origin story begins like anti-choice propaganda: In 1945, a 19-year-old Jackie Jean Sarkisian, pregnant by a husband she barely knew, left her marriage after three months and returned home. There, Jackie Jean’s mother—who had given birth to Jackie Jean when she was 13 years old—demanded she get an abortion.
Years later, Jackie Jean described the experience: “I remember waiting in an old-fashioned chrome chair. The chrome was cold, yet the sweat was running off me, I was so scared. When they told me it was my turn, I got onto the table. But as I lay there, I somehow knew I couldn’t go through with it, so I got off.” As Cher, in her eponymous Cher: The Memoir (Dey Street), remembers her mother saying, “Can you believe I came that close to not having you?”
But in Cher, nothing is simple, least of all the lives of women attempting to exist within a system stacked against them. “She was at a dreadful point in her young life with only two roads to choose from, neither of which were easy,” Cher writes of her mother’s decision. “Confused and afraid, she headed down one road but then turned back and took the other. I survived as a consequence, and I’ve never questioned how close she came to not having me. It was her body, her life, and her choice to make. Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.”
Cher’s memoir—the first in a two-book project, written, per the New York Times, with the help of three ghostwriters and a weeklong visit from her editor—spans the time from her mother’s conception to a pivotal, early 1980s chat with her old friend, Francis Ford Coppola, who encourages Cher to really give acting a go. It’s remarkably candid, filled with intimate moments in the making of a star: Here is Cher, at 17, living at the Hollywood Studio Club in the early ‘60s; here she is, for the first time, performing in the nascent personal style that would define her persona, after baggage handlers lost her trunks before a San Francisco gig where she opened for the Beach Boys.
There are, too, teenage encounters that the reader may question, like the dates Cher went on with Warren Beatty when he was 25 and she 15; she later became good friends with him when she was dating David Geffen. (In 2022, a woman filed a lawsuit against Beatty, alleging that he sexually assaulted her when she was 14 and he was 35; a judge dismissed the suit, without prejudice.) Her decades-long partnership with Sonny Bono began when she moved in with him at age 16 and he was 27; she writes that they slept in his bedroom in separate twin beds, and that she earned her keep by cooking and cleaning.
There are, in adulthood, romantic relationships and love affairs with “beautiful” Gregg Allman and, later, Gene Simmons, who was prone to over-the-top gestures like skywriting “I Love You Cher” above the Beverly Hills Hotel on her birthday, or renting an Army tank filled with her favorite chocolate bar, Snickers.
