Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”

Even in the annals of single-name celebrities — Sting, Madonna, Beyoncé, Zendaya — Cher is in the stratosphere of the 1%. She has been a household name for six decades. She was 19 when she had her first No. 1 single with Sonny Bono. She won an Oscar for “Moonstruck,” an Emmy for “Cher: The Farewell Tour” and a Grammy for “Believe.” Her face has appeared on screens of all sizes, and her music has been a soundtrack for multiple generations.

But wrangling a definitive account of her life struck a nerve for Cher. There were dark corners to explore and 78 years of material to sift through. And — this might have been the hardest part — she had to make peace with the fact that her most personal stories would be in the hands of scores of readers.

“This book has exhausted me,” she said of the first volume of her two- part eponymous memoir, out now. “It took a lot out of me.”

“Cher” is a gutsy account of tenacity and perseverance: Cher’s childhood was unstable. Her marriage to Sonny Bono had devastating aftershocks. The book is also a cultural history packed with strong opinions, boldface names and head- spinning throwbacks: Cher’s first concert was Elvis. Her first movie was “Dumbo.” One of the first cars she drove was a ’57 Chevy stolen from her boyfriend.

On the page, Cher’s voice reverberates with the grit and depth that made her famous.

But a ghostwritten first draft didn’t have this effect, Cher said; it didn’t feel like “her.” It made her realize she needed to expand her project to a second volume. “Too much life,” she said. “Lived too long.”

After this epiphany, the bulk of the book came together in a feverish four months, thanks to two more ghostwriters and an editor who made a weeklong house call. It begins with Cher’s birth in 1946 — her legal name was Cheryl Sarkisian — and ends in the early 1980s when she’s chatting with Francis Ford Coppola about making the leap from singing to acting. (He asks, “So what are you waiting for?”)

Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, was a singer, actor and scrabbler from rural Arkansas who played bit parts in “Gunsmoke” and “I Love Lucy.” Her father, Johnnie Sarkisian, was a grifter and a heroin addict who mostly stayed out of the picture until he smelled money. They married when Holt was 19 and Sarkisian was 20; three months later, Holt was pregnant and her mother took her to get an abortion.

“It was her body, her life and her choice,” Cher writes of Holt’s decision not to go through with the procedure, which was illegal. “Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.”

When Cher was an infant, Sarkisian deposited her at a Catholic children’s home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before skipping town. Holt, then a waitress at an all-night diner, forked over $4.50 a week for her daughter’s care, visiting weekly and reclaiming Cher as soon as she was able. The timeline is unclear — until the day she died, Holt cried when talking about this era — but Cher was able to walk by the time she left the orphanage.

Holt’s role in her daughters’ lives was not unlike the one Cher played in the 1990 film “Mermaids” — the unpredictable single mother that a New York Times critic described as “beloved in fiction and hell-on-wheels in fact.” Cher and her younger sister, Georganne Bartylak, still argue about how many times Holt was married.

“I say six, which is a lot. She says eight,” Bartylak said. “You cannot count the fact that she married two men twice. That’s not fair!” Sarkisian was one of the two-timers (in every sense).

Cher was 16 when she first met Bono at a coffee shop. He was 27. She lied about her age, and the two became friends. Soon after, Cher’s living situation fell through, and she didn’t want to move back in with her mother. Bono offered her a place to live in exchange for cooking and cleaning. Matching souvenir wedding rings came a few years later — as did parenthood and fame, “I Got You Babe” and “The Sonny & Cher Show.”

“It wasn’t a #MeToo moment because I lied to him,” Cher said. But, she said, “I’m not forgiving him because there were some things he did that were ridiculous.”

Bono became Cher’s champion, persuading his boss, Phillip Spector, to let her sing with the Ronettes one day when Darlene Love’s car broke down. They started recording together, first as Caesar & Cleo, then as Sonny & Cher. There were tender moments (such as their impromptu wedding ceremony in a bathroom) and heady ones (a trip to London, where they learned that “I Got You Babe” had outpaced the Beatles’ “Help” on the British charts and sold 1 million copies in two weeks).

But fame changed Bono. The pair were new parents, busy with their show, when he became “my way or the highway,” Cher said.

Being a popular entertainer wasn’t enough; Bono wanted to be a mogul. He established the Benevolent Army of El Primo, in which everyone in his orbit was issued a rank, including Cher, with Bono as boss. Cher wasn’t allowed to socialize with band members, or even go to a Tupperware party hosted by Brian Wilson’s wife. The couple stopped going to dinners, concerts and movies.

Bono also arranged their finances so that Cher was working for him — an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises. She wasn’t immediately aware of this; Bono was “like a parent,” to her, and their home represented stability, permanence, everything she’d missed in her tumultuous youth. She trusted him.

“He took all my money,” Cher said. “I just thought, We’re husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine. It didn’t occur to me that there was another way.”

Hard as it was to square this confession with the stage- dominating, boundary- pushing Cher of legend, there was grace in her honesty. “To this day,” Cher said, “I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, during what day, did you go, “Yeah, you know what? I’m going to take her money.” ’ ”

Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998. But by then their marriage was long over. She rebuilt her career, exiling herself to the “elephant’s graveyard” of Las Vegas, where she put on two shows a night, seven days a week, for several months.

She dated David Geffen, who helped her sort out her finances and had a brief marriage to Gregg Allman. But it’s clear from her memoir that her time with Bono was foundational.

Cher is restrained and respectful on the subject of her children, Elijah Skye Blue Allman and Chaz Bono, who is transgender. In a note at the front of the book, she writes, “In this memoir, I refer to my son Chaz as Chas, the name he went by during the years covered in this book. Chaz has granted his blessing for this usage. In the next volume, at the appropriate point, I will refer to my son as Chaz.”

And of course, unlike many of her contemporaries, Cher remains committed to her career. She still works with her voice teacher, who is 96. “You’re not really supposed to be able to sing at this age,” she said. “I’ve been singing my whole life. It will make me sad the day I can’t.”

Then, she added, “I’ve been on the road my whole life. It’s either a day off or it’s a work day. What would I do if I wasn’t doing this?”

Carrie Thornton, Cher’s editor at Dey Street, said a two-volume approach wasn’t always the plan. But, during the writing process, it became apparent that Cher’s move from singing to acting made for a natural break. Plus, Thornton pointed out, a two-part memoir “feels like such a flex.” The second volume is planned for a year from now.