“I didn’t kill her you killed her, by ignoring her. Bono blamed his father for his mother’s death. “He doesn’t notice that I’m in the room looking at him,” Bono writes in Surrender, his entrancing new memoir.

Bono would watch him, unable to get to him. He would stand in front of their stereo, surrounded by the strains of La Traviata, lost to the rest of the world. “It’s not just she’s dead we disappeared her,” Bono says. They barely even thought of her, at least for years. Then Bono, his father, and his brother returned home and almost never spoke of her again. Bono and his brother were ushered into her hospital room, and they held her hands while the machine keeping her alive was flicked off. His mother lingered on for a few more days after the stroke. “People who need to be loved at scale, with 20,000 people screaming your name every night, are generally to be avoided,” Bono says with a laugh. Their mothers’ deaths left them with this bottomless craving. Bono is now 62 and reflecting on how many rock stars lost their mother at a crucial age: John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney-the list of the abandoned goes on and on. It was at that instant, Bono says, that his home disappeared. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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