Cher’s memoir is totally fabulous.

“Cher, what is your plan?” the star asked herself in 1975 as she jetted from Burbank to Las Vegas to marry the musician Gregg Allman. “Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression,” Cher writes, recounting how her 10-year-old grandmother was sent to work in a boardinghouse, where she caught the eye of a local baker’s assistant. Sonny & Cher’s first hit, “Baby Don’t Go,” is the farewell call of a girl who “never had a mother” and “hardly knew my dad,” who shops in secondhand stores and has had enough of “the way this old town laughs at me.” Many of her solo hits afterward told similar stories about a girl “born in the wagon of a travelin’ show” shunned by “the people of the town,” and a mixed-race woman whose family “never settled, went from town to town” because they were welcomed nowhere. The first big break Sonny & Cher got came when the concierge at the London hotel where they’d made reservations took one look at her “striped bell-bottoms” and his “caveman vest” and refused to give them a room. There’s the husband who “drilled the hick” out of her mother, her praise for Lucille Ball as a “balls-to-the-wall kick-ass chick,” and her admission, when cornered by a reporter asking about her failed marriage to Allman, that “after years of having decisions made for me by Sonny, I was making my own but was bound to get it wrong sometimes.” Cher was no calculating Madonna or steely Streisand.