‘She was never spoken of again’: Bono recounts his mother’s death in new memoir

‘We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain,’ Bono recalls of his father and brother after his mother’s death. Photograph: Aaron Favila/AP

The Irish rock star Bono has revealed his distress at visiting his mother on her deathbed in a Dublin hospital after she had an aneurysm when he was 14 years old.

In an extract published in the New Yorker from his upcoming memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the U2 frontman recalls that Iris Hewson collapsed at the funeral of her father “Gags” Rankin in 1974 and died just days later, and “she was never spoken of again” in the house he shared with his father Bob and elder brother Norman.