What a 16-Year-Old Doesn’t Yet Know
Cher’s memoir is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world.
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A 16-year-old girl may be wise, funny, well educated, and ambitious, and she can probably hold her own in conversation. She may have reached her adult height and shoe size. By this point in her life, she has probably read books or heard songs that will make a permanent mark on her. She may have had sex or fallen in love; she may be dead serious, and be determined to be taken seriously. But a 16-year-old girl is still a child.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
On Wednesday, Vanity Fair published a profile of Augusta Britt, a woman the author calls the “secret muse” of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died last year. According to Britt, McCarthy was 42 when they met in 1976; she was 16, a runaway fleeing an abusive childhood. She tells Vanity Fair’s Vincenzo Barney that McCarthy ferried her across the border to Mexico, forged her birth certificate, and began a sexual affair with her. Britt is adamant that their relationship was consensual: “It all felt right. It felt good … I loved him. He was my safety.” But McCarthy also used her experiences in his novels, she alleges, conjuring and then killing off characters based on her. “I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about,” she says. “I felt kind of violated.”
Girls have long been asked to grow up quickly. Reading about Britt made me think of an article my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week, about Cher’s self-titled memoir (the first half of a promised duology). This volume follows her from birth to 1980, dealing in large part with her unstable childhood—which was marked by abuse, deprivation, and frequent moves around the country—and her scrappy rise to fame. At 15, she was in Los Angeles cavorting with movie stars such as Warren Beatty. At 16, she writes, she met the 27-year-old Sonny Bono. When she became homeless, she moved in with him, initially as a friend. “One day, he kissed her, and that was that,” Gilbert writes. The entity known as Sonny & Cher was born. He would be her husband and creative partner for the next decade, and they’d be divorced before she was 30.
Cher’s book is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world. Her current perspective, at 78, allows for frank assessments of difficult situations: Cher’s grandmother Lynda gave birth to her mother, Jackie Jean, at 13; Jackie Jean married Cher’s father, Johnnie, at 19 and immediately regretted it. Her daughter finds no romance in their union. “Gullible and trapped, my mother was living at a time when women had little or no support from society, so, seeing no other way out, she went back to Johnnie even though she claimed she never loved or trusted him,” Cher writes. (Johnnie would later run off without a word.) A boyfriend of her mother’s professed his love for Cher. “It was a shockingly inappropriate statement on any level,” she writes, “but especially since I was only fourteen.”
For all her keen hindsight, Cher’s writing about her life as a teenager is imbued with authentically teenage feelings. Her awkwardness and fears are on the page alongside the effervescent highs of first crushes and successes. When they moved in together, she says, “Sonny and I became more like a brother and sister, or perhaps more accurately a father and daughter, because I was the insecure kid full of phobias, the teenager who didn’t like silence and couldn’t get to sleep unless the television was on.” When her mother found out she was living with Bono and demanded she return home, Cher was “certain that I’d be grounded until I was fifty and never see Sonny again.”
These passages make the reader feel close to the adolescent Cher. They also emphasize just how young she was, despite her talent and savvy, and how much she was up against. “I’m hard-pressed to think of another celebrity author so insistent on dispensing with rose-tinted reminiscences,” Gilbert writes. “Cher wants you to know that for most people—and absolutely for most women—the 20th century was no cakewalk.” Even as she admits that she genuinely loved Bono, she details his cruelties. He mistreated her domestically (controlling her; acting out when jealous) and professionally (he let hundreds of thousands of dollars of back taxes pile up; he owned 95 percent of “Cher Enterprises” while his lawyer took the remaining 5 percent).
What strikes me most is how much time separates Cher’s career highs from her teenage years—and the unique perspective that time affords her. The events she’s recalling occurred a lifetime ago. Her book ends before she wins an Oscar for Moonstruck, before she releases “If I Could Turn Back Time,” before the success of Believe, and long before her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Looking back, Cher sagely understands that her 16-year-old self, meeting Bono for the first time, still had so much life in front of her—so many honors, relationships, stumbling blocks, and milestones were yet to come. The same is true of any 16-year-old girl.
Cher Has a History Lesson for Us All
By Sophie Gilbert
The singer has long stood for a brassy, strutting kind of survival. Her new account of her early life explains how that came to be.
What to Read
Break It Down, by Lydia Davis
Davis is a master of the very short story, and the collection that made her name, Break It Down, includes such works as the four-sentence “What She Knew,” where an insecure young woman tries to understand why men are flirting with her, and the six-sentence “The Fish,” where a woman confronts “certain irrevocable mistakes” in her life, including the dinner she’s cooked for herself. These nimble, acrobatic shorts—which established her as a formidable figure in American literature—are contrasted by longer stories that showcase Davis’s dry humor and keen emotional insight. In “The Letter,” a woman sits through a long-awaited breakup conversation: “Right away she lost her appetite, but he ate very well and ate her dinner too.” And the title story is a cathartic, sensitive look at the cost of a failed relationship: “You’re left with this large heavy pain in you,” a man mourning a lost love reflects, “that you try to numb by reading.” Davis’s stories plunge directly into the hurt of everyday life, leaving the reader both comforted and entertained. — Celine Nguyen
From our list: What to read when you have only half an hour
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