‘Cher: The Memoir Part One’By Cherc.2024, Dey St.$36/413 pages Mother knows best. At least that’s what she’d like you to think because she said it a hundred times while you were growing up, until you actually believed.
One day, though, if you were lucky, you learned that Mother didn’t always know best, but she did her best – like in the new book “Cher: The Memoir Part One” by Cher, when Mom helped make a star.
Though she doesn’t remember it, little Cheryl Sarkisian spent a few weeks in a Catholic Charities orphanage when she was tiny, because her father had disappeared and her mother couldn’t afford to take care of her. “Cheryl,” by the way, was the name on her birth certificate, although her mother meant to name her “Cherilyn.” That first time wasn’t the last time little Cher was left with someone other than her mother, Jackie Jean, a beautiful, talented struggling singer-actress who’d been born into poverty and stayed there much of her life.
When money was tight, she temporarily dropped her daughter off with friends or family, or the little family moved from house to house and state to state.