Bono speaks candidly about grief in new memoir
Bono has never shirked the sentimental in his music, however, there is one subject that feels he buried for too long and he has opened up about it in his stirring new memoir.
Bono’s mother Iris passed away when the singer was only 14 years old. He visited her in hospital after she suffered an aneurysm and thereafter, he feels that his family simply did their best to forget her as a coping mechanism.
In a new extract from his book Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, he has opened up on this subject, recalling that after she died “she was never spoken of again” by his father Bob and older brother Norman.
Bono writes: “I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again. We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.”
With candid recollection, Bono continues: “Even though it’s Grandda’s funeral, and even though Iris has fainted, we’re kids, cousins, running around and laughing. Until Ruth, my mother’s younger sister, bursts through the door. ‘Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.”
Later adding: “Three days later Norman and I are brought into the hospital to say goodbye. She’s alive but barely … Ruth is outside the hospital room, wailing, with my father, whose eyes have less life in them than my mother’s.”
Concluding: “I enter the room at war with the universe, but Iris looks peaceful. It’s hard to figure that a large part of her has already left. We hold her hand. There’s a clicking sound, but we don’t hear it.”
These sombre tales of sober reflection are strewn throughout his memoir as the star shows us a personal side that even he hasn’t embraced too often. Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story is due for release on November 1st via Penguin Random House.
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