The singer said she learned in the 1970s that her legal name wasn’t what she thought it was, due to a mistake on her birth certificate.

The memoir traces the first half of her life, including how she got her legal name. Cher was born in 1946 in El Centro, California to Georgia Holt, a young, struggling actress, who endured a long, unmedicated labor. "She was exhausted by the time I arrived at around 7:30 a.m. on Monday, May 20," Cher wrote.

Cher recalls a curious interlude from her rich and many-chaptered history in her new book “Cher: The Memoir, Part One.”