Surrender

This memoir by Bono, the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, traces a life shaped by loss, faith, friendship, music, and activism. Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin in 1960, Bono moves between past and present in a narrative that spans six decades, framing the journey as one of leaving home to find home.

The memoir opens in late 2016 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where Bono underwent emergency open-heart surgery to repair a blister on his aorta that was close to bursting. Born with a congenital condition in which one heart chamber has two doors instead of three, he had unknowingly lived for decades on borrowed time. During recovery, he hallucinated and could not breathe, reaching for his faith and, for the first time, unable to find it. This medical crisis frames the book's central preoccupation: the search for home, for meaning, and for the breath that sustains a life.

From the hospital, Bono flashes back to his childhood at 10 Cedarwood Road in Dublin, a working-class household where his father, Bob Hewson, a gifted amateur tenor, and his mother, Iris, a practical and funny woman of Protestant background, raised two sons in a Catholic-Protestant mixed marriage that defied the sectarianism of the era. When Bono was 14, Iris collapsed at her own father's funeral and died three days later of a brain aneurysm. The three remaining Hewson males never spoke of her again, and Bono describes the household as an opera of rage, melancholy, and silence. His father, emotionally absent and unable to encourage his son's musical talent, clashed constantly with the teenager. Bono's older brother, Norman, taught him guitar chords and introduced him to recorded music through a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder, providing a lifeline.

Two childhood friendships proved equally formative. Derek "Guggi" Rowen, Bono's best friend since age three, gave him his stage name, shortened from "Bono Vox of O'Connell Street" after a Dublin hearing aid shop, and taught him to share everything fifty-fifty. Fionán "Gavin Friday" Hanvey showed Bono what an artistic life looked like, enduring violent anti-gay abuse while channeling David Bowie and T. Rex into a fiercely original persona. Together they created Lypton Village, an alternative community with its own surreal language and humor, from which two bands emerged: the Virgin Prunes and U2.

At Mount Temple Comprehensive School, a nondenominational, coeducational institution rare in conservative Ireland, Bono met Alison Stewart. Their slow-burning romance began with a first kiss under a school awning months after Iris's death, and Ali would become the steady center of Bono's life. In 1976, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a notice on the school board seeking musicians, and the future members of U2 gathered in his kitchen: Larry on drums, Adam Clayton on bass, and David "Edge" Evans on guitar. They began writing original songs because they could not adequately play covers.

Bono traces U2's rise through years of rejection: a self-funded trip with Ali to London to hustle demo tapes, tense negotiations with their future manager Paul McGuinness, and a pivotal show at Dublin's National Stadium in February 1980 where Nick Stewart, a talent scout from Island Records, offered to sign them. The band signed a worldwide recording contract in the ladies' toilets of London's Lyceum Theatre.

Their debut album, Boy (1980), produced by Steve Lillywhite, launched tours across Europe and the United States, but a crisis of faith nearly ended U2 when Bono, Edge, and Larry became deeply involved with Shalom, a charismatic Christian community in Dublin whose leaders questioned whether music could serve God. Edge decided to leave, and Bono said he would follow. Their manager saved the group by asking whether God would want them to break a legal contract for a tour already booked. Edge took this as a sign to continue.

The band found its purpose with War (1983) and "Sunday Bloody Sunday," which addressed the 1972 massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, where the British army shot 28 unarmed civilians during a peaceful protest. Bono married Ali on August 31, 1982, with Adam as best man. The arrival of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois for The Unforgettable Fire (1984) expanded U2's sonic ambitions, and a volunteer stint with Ali at an Ethiopian famine relief station in 1985 transformed Bono's worldview and planted the seeds of his activism. The Joshua Tree (1987) made U2 one of the biggest bands in the world, but success strained Bono's marriage as Ali retreated into university study and flying lessons.

A New Year's Eve declaration in Dublin in 1989 that U2 needed to reinvent themselves launched the band's most radical transformation. Recording Achtung Baby at Hansa Studios in Berlin in 1990, the band nearly broke apart over creative disagreements before Edge combined two discarded chord sequences into "One," a song Bono describes as written because the band needed to hear it. The ZOO TV Tour that followed featured Bono's ironic alter ego, "the Fly," and redefined live rock performance with multimedia spectacle and satellite broadcasts from besieged Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. In November 1993, Adam's addiction reached a crisis when he failed to appear for a show in Sydney, the only time U2 performed without all four members. The Pop album (1997) and its disastrous Las Vegas tour opening marked a creative low point. The death of close friend Michael Hutchence of INXS by suicide in November 1997 devastated Bono, inspiring "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of."

The memoir's second half charts Bono's parallel career as an activist. A meeting with Harry Belafonte yielded the guiding principle of his advocacy: Martin Luther King Jr.'s instruction to find common ground with opponents rather than dismiss them. Bono pitched the Jubilee 2000 debt cancellation campaign to President Clinton in March 1999, and the effort helped secure the cancellation of more than $100 billion in debts owed by the poorest countries. Working with Bobby Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, and courting both left and right in Washington, Bono then spent two years persuading the George W. Bush administration to launch the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a $15 billion initiative announced during the 2003 State of the Union address that became the largest health intervention to fight a single disease in the history of medicine. He founded organizations including Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (DATA); ONE; and (RED) to sustain these efforts, drawing inspiration from Nelson Mandela, who told him that poverty is man-made and can be overcome.

Throughout, Bono weaves in the story of his father's decline and death from cancer during the Elevation Tour. Their relationship had slowly warmed into something like friendship over Sunday pub meetings in Dalkey, a village south of Dublin. After Bob's death, Bono apologized to him in a chapel in the south of France, not for his father's failings but for his own rage. A family secret revealed in 2000, that Bono's cousin Scott Rankin was actually his half-brother born of Bob's relationship with Bono's aunt Barbara, reframed that lifelong anger: Bob had been emotionally absent not from indifference but because he was leading another life.

Bono also recounts the controversy surrounding Songs of Innocence (2014), an album exploring his earliest memories that was distributed free to 500 million Apple iTunes accounts at his suggestion. Rather than a welcome gift, the public perceived it as an intrusion. He describes surviving the July 2016 terrorist attack in Nice with his family and reflecting on the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris, events that deepened his sense of fragility and gratitude.

The memoir's final movement finds Bono on the last night of the Innocence + Experience Tour in Berlin in November 2018, watching his bandmates with tearful gratitude nearly two years after his open-heart surgery. He articulates the tour's guiding insight: that wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience. Two days later, waking beside Ali in their Dublin home, he studies her sleeping face and understands that the search for home is over. In a final chapter, he reimagines his own birth as a countdown from the womb to the world, hearing his mother's heartbeat in iambic pentameter, preparing to take the first breath that would power his voice, his career, and his life.