U2 singer Bono has just announced details of his upcoming memoir ‘Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story’.
The memoir which arrives on November 1 via via publishing house Alfred A. Knopf (and in audiobook form via Penguin Random House), can be pre ordered here.
The upcoming Bono memoir will explore 40 tracks from the U2 discography. Each chapter is named after a U2 track, as it explores the life of the band’s frontman.
A press release has also added that the book will document everything from “from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was 14, to U2’s unlikely journey to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands, to his 20 years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty”.
‘Out Of Control’
Bono first shared a preview of this memoir via social media yesterday, in conjunction with his 62nd birthday.
The singer gave fans an insight into one of the memoir’s chapter’s ‘Out Of Control’. This was also shared in the form of a narrated animation.
The chapter itself also details the Ramones-inspired genesis of U2’s 1979 track. See below.
Releasing a statement, Bono had this to say.
“When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs”, he wrote.
“The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept”.
He continued, “A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress… with a fair amount of fun along the way”.
“All of the passion that Bono brings to his music and his life he also brings to the page”, publisher Reagan Arthur said in his own statement.
“Seven years ago another legend, the late Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, acquired the book, because he knew Bono fits into the tradition of literary Irish storytellers, and we were lucky to have Sonny’s notes on an early draft of the manuscript”.
“We’re luckier still that Bono not only has a dramatic personal history to tell, but he’s also a truly gifted writer. Surrender is honest, intimate, irreverent, and profound – a dazzling memoir of a remarkable life”.
This news comes after it emerged that Bono and U2 guitarist the Edge had also performed a special concert in Kyiv in support of Ukraine in their ongoing conflict with Russia. More on this here.
