Bono tells of his secret half-brother and of family forgiveness

msn.com:

The U2 frontman has a half-brother he has not talked about before, who was born after his father had an affair while living at home in Dublin with Bono, his brother Norman and their mother.

Bono describes the discovery, and tells how he finally resolved his difficult relationship with his late father, a postal worker Brendan “Bob” Hewson, in a candid radio interview in the runup to the publication of his memoir, Surrender. “I do have another who I love and adore,” he tells Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs this morning.

Bono, whose real name is Paul, refers to finding a sibling “that I didn’t know I didn’t have … or maybe I did”. Learning of the existence of a half-brother, and of a clandestine romance, has helped Bono make sense of his father’s behaviour at the time of the sudden death of his mother, Iris, when Bono was 14.

His father died in 2001. “My father was going through a lot. His head was elsewhere because his heart was elsewhere,” Bono, 62, recalls. “I could tell my father had a deep friendship with this gorgeous woman who was part of the family and then they had a child which was all kept a secret.