The first chapter of the superstar performer’s recollections is full-blooded and hearty, but only hints at her real persona

“Resilience is in my DNA,” says Cher in her new memoir, and leafing through the pages, there’s no doubt she’s needed it. With respect, there are times when the reader needs it too. Thumping in at more than 430 pages, Part One ends at the start of the 1980s. If you’re after later incarnations of Cher (say, the magnificent straddler of giant guns on a US navy battleship in the 1989 If I Could Turn Back Time video), you’ll have to wait for Part Two, but there’s a lot to get stuck into here.

Singer, actor, wisecracker, gay icon and “goddess of pop”, Cher is one of the all-time great US entertainment queens. Born Cheryl Sarkisian in California in 1946, she endured a childhood that ricocheted chaotically between poverty, violence and upheaval (her “deadbeat” Armenian father was a largely absent heroin addict), and wealth and plenty (depending on who her starlet mother was married to at the time). As Cher writes: “Ours is a strange story of southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression.”