Cher on her six-decade career: “I’ve always thought of myself as a bumper car”

Cher may have been forced to look back on her life in order to write her upcoming memoir, but at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame over the weekend, she told reporters that her incredible success and longevity over six decades isn’t anything she’s spent a lot of time pondering.

“I don’t have a perspective exactly. I just was busy living my life,” she said backstage at the induction ceremony on Oct. 19. “And so I wasn’t, like, thinking about it at all.”

“I was, like, thinking about it from minute to minute, or thing to thing, or bad to good,” she continued.

However, Cher’s many ups and downs during those six decades — such as her success with Sonny & Cher, going broke after her divorce from Sonny, motherhood, TV and movie stardom, and a massive comeback with “Believe” — led her to use an interesting metaphor to describe how she’s moved through life.

“I always thought of myself as, like, a bumper car,” she told reporters. “And when I hit a road, I would just back up and turn in a different direction because I wasn’t going to just stop doing what I love.”

Cher’s book Cher: The Memoir, Part One arrives Nov. 19. She’s doing a book tour in support of it starting Nov. 20 in New York City. You can buy tickets for it now.