U2 frontman Bono announced a memoir — Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story — today, which is also his birthday. The autobiography tracing the Irish rocker’s life will arrive on November 1 via Alfred A. Knopf.
Surrender’s subtitle, 40 Songs, One Story, refers to the book’s 40 chapters, each named after a U2 song. Bono — who also included 40 original drawings — further detailed the memoir:
When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. 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. 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.
“In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2’s unlikely journey to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty,” press materials for Surrender noted. “Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life—and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him.”
Head here to pre-order Bono’s Surrender and listen to Bono reading an excerpt from the memoir below:
