In an excerpt shared from Bono's upcoming memoir 'Surrender,' the musician recalled how his mother’s death ultimately pushed him into becoming a rockstar.
Bono also didn’t have a piano at home, though remembered that he was transfixed by the instrument whenever he came across it at their church hall in Ireland. He said he pleaded with his family to take the one his grandmother was selling, but his mother insisted he had “no interest in singing.”
But music stayed with him, and after his mother’s death, the singer likened the subsequent shift in energy at home to an opera, writing: “The subject of the opera is the absence of a woman called Iris, and the music swells to stay the silence that envelops the house and the three men—one of whom is just a boy.”
While music helped Bono heal from the loss of his mother, he said his family was never quite the same after her death.