Cher considered jumping off the balcony during ‘Loveless Marriage’ with Sonny Bono

Cher looks back on her complicated relationship with Sonny Bono.

In her new book Cher: The Memoir, Part 1out on Tuesday, November 19, the entertainment legend opens up about the demise of their marriage.

Cher and Bono were 16 and 27 respectively when they met. The couple rose to fame with their hit song “I Got You Babe” before finding success with their variety show The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. While they had an unofficial wedding in 1964, they were actually married in 1969. Despite their prolific professional partnership, Cher writes that Bono was controlling—and she began to feel “trapped” in what she calls a “loveless marriage “.

In 1972, Cher was 26 and in Las Vegas to work with the mercurial Bono when she reached her breaking point, stepped onto her hotel balcony and looked down.

“I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and just disappear,” writes Cher, 78. “For a few crazy minutes, I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times.”

But the thought of her loved ones — her then-toddler Chaz, her mother Georgia and her sister Georganne — stopped Cher, who writes, “things like this could make people who look up to me feel like it’s a viable solution .”

In Las Vegas, she had an epiphany: “I don’t have to run away. I can just leave him.”

Cher and Bono quietly parted ways soon after. They filed for divorce until 1974 before finalizing their contentious divorce in 1975 after a bitter custody battle over Chaz. Over the years, they remained friendly co-parents and even reunited professionally for The Sonny & Cher Show.

In 2023, Cher looked back on their relationship and told PEOPLE that he “pissed me off royally and hurt me” but that they made peace.

“One day he came into the kitchen at my house and said, ‘Cher, I want to apologize. I realized I hurt you in so many ways and I was wrong,'” she said of Bono, who died in 1998 “It went a long way for me.”

Cher revealed her two-part memoir in July. At the time, he teased that the first installment would follow “her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono – revealing the very complicated relationship that made them world famous but ultimately drove them apart.”

During a performance at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in November 2023, Cher said her life was “too big for just one book.”

On November 20, Cher will embark on a book tour starting in New York City. After that, she will make stops in Englewood, NJ; London; Beverly Hills, California; and San Francisco.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988, texting “STRENGTH” to the crisis text line on 741741 or going to 988lifeline.org.