U2’s Bono has opened up about the impact his mother’s shock death had on him, and how it ultimately prompted him to turn to music.
In an extract from his upcoming memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story published in the New Yorker, the Irish rocker, 62, revealed his distress at visiting his mother, Iris Hewson, on her deathbed in a hospital in Dublin after she had collapsed at her father’s funeral in 1974. He was 14.
Hewson had an aneurysm at the funeral of Bono’s grandfather, and died days later. Bono said following her death, in the house he grew up in with his father Bob and brother Norman, “she was never spoken of again.
“I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again,” he wrote. “We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.”
Bono, who was born Paul David Hewson, has been open in the past about how his mother’s passing left a “hole in [his] heart” and spurred his desire to be a rock star
Following her death when he was 14, he turned to music to cope with his grief, and various U2 songs reference his mother’s death, including Iris (Hold Me Close), Mofo, Out of Control, Tomorrow and I Will Follow.
In the extract, he revealed that his mother’s family – the Rankin family – is “susceptible to the brain aneurysm.”
