Cher’s Dyslexia: How It Became Her Advantage

Cher, the dyslexic singer and actress, on stage in a gold headdress during her 2019 tour — Photo: Raph_PH, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.

Cher needs only one name. She has been making hit records since the 1960s, first with Sonny Bono and then on her own. She also won the Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck.

She did it without finishing high school. She has dyslexia, and she also has trouble with numbers, which is called dyscalculia.

In 2024 she told the story again in her bestselling book, Cher: The Memoir, Part One.

School and the hard part

Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian in California in 1946. In her earlier book, The First Time, she wrote that she could not read fast enough to finish her homework. Math made no sense to her at all.

Nobody tested her. Her report cards kept saying she was not living up to her potential. She has said her grades were a mix, with Ds and Fs in some classes and As and Bs in others.

The rest of school went fine. On British TV in 2024 she said she was popular, good at sports, funny, and could sing. It was the schoolwork that she called a nightmare.

At 16, two weeks into 11th grade, she quit. She headed for Hollywood.

When she found out

Cher did not get an answer until she was an adult and a mother. Her child Chaz was struggling with reading, so she took Chaz to a testing center. The result was dyslexia.

The people doing the testing then asked Cher about her own reading and writing. She told them how her mind raced ahead of her hand and how she skipped letters in the middle of words. They told her she had learning differences too.

She has described it as a moment when everything clicked. She finally understood why school had been so hard.

Sources do not agree on her exact age that day, so we will not guess.

Cher’s dyslexic advantage

Cher does not dress dyslexia up. She has called herself a terrible reader and has said that she and numbers have no relationship. In 2024 she said reading still takes far more effort and that she makes lots of mistakes.

But look at what she built around it.

Listening. This is the big one, and it comes from her.

“Almost everything I learned, I had to learn by listening.”

Cher, as quoted by Understood.org

A singer who learned the world by ear. That makes sense to us.

Memory. The University of Michigan’s DyslexiaHelp site reports that she reads a script slowly the first time and then has no trouble memorizing it. She said she wrote her whole memoir from memory, because she does not like writing things down.

Knowing how she works. She once told a director she can read or she can act, but not both at the same time. For the audiobook of her memoir, she read the start of each chapter herself. Then actor Stephanie J. Block, who played her on Broadway, took over.

Owning it. She was once asked on Twitter if she would undo her dyslexia. She said no. It caused pain, she said, but it is part of who she is.

Her memoir came out in November 2024 and went to number one on the New York Times list. A second part is planned.

What we take from it

We like that Cher never pretended reading got easy. She found other ways in, and then she used them for sixty years.

A school report said she was not living up to her potential. We think the report was a little early.