November 1, 2024
Bestselling Sheff (Beautiful Boy) offers a biography of artist Yoko Ono. Sheff first met Yoko in 1980 when he interviewed her and her husband John Lennon, shortly before Lennon's murder. They became close, and Sheff draws on his experiences and interviews with Ono and her friends and family to tell the story of her remarkable life. Prepub Alert.
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February 15, 2025
Inside the complex world of an artist who was much more than a Beatle wife. Veteran journalist and memoirist Sheff (Beautiful Boy, 2008) confesses early that he is friends with Yoko Ono, the performance artist, musician, and famous widow of John Lennon; he met the couple in 1980, at age 24, to conduct a wide-ranging interview forPlayboy and quickly bonded with them. That doesn't mean he eschews unpleasant elements of her history. She maintained a heroin addiction with Lennon for a time, had an expensive interest in numerologists and astrologers who chiseled her, and all but pretended that her longtime post-Lennon partner, Sam Havadtoy, didn't exist. But the book is mainly intended as a defense of Ono: Sheff frames her as an accomplished artist well before she met Lennon at a London gallery, demolishes the false and often bigoted argument that she broke up the Beatles, and reassesses her work as a musician, which is often dismissed as shrill and tuneless. Throughout, a theme of bravery persists: She left the comfort of her well-off family in Japan and quit school to work as an independent performance artist. (Her most famous work is "Cut Piece," in which audience members were invited to cut off pieces of her clothing as she sat still.) Moreover, she spent decades trying to locate her daughter (with her first husband), who had joined a cult and vanished. (Lennon moved with her to America in large part to make that search easier.) Much of the book's latter sections, following Lennon's murder in 1980, betray a friend's effort at hagiography, praising her music and later accomplishments with little detail or context. But the best of the book reveals Ono as an emotionally sensitive and charmingly provocative artist who, in Lennon, found an ideal muse. "We saw each other's loneliness," she said. A compromised biography that still sheds light on a divisive figure.
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March 1, 2025
Few public figures have been as maligned and misunderstood as Yoko Ono, an artist most famous for being the wife and creative partner of John Lennon. Sheff (The Buddhist on Death Row, 2020) offers an expansive portrait of Ono as avant-garde artist, vocalist, and peace activist. Sheff interviewed Ono and Lennon in 1980 for Playboy just months before Lennon's murder. In the aftermath, Sheff and Ono developed a close friendship, which informs this in-depth and compelling biography. It is organized in three parts. The first details Ono's early life in Japan and New York City and her emergence as an influential artist in the Fluxus collective. Part two describes the vicious misogyny and racism she endured while collaborating with Lennon on such enduring works as Imagine and Plastic Ono Band. Part three describes Ono's life after Lennon's death, years marked by grief and betrayal as well as triumph and redemption. Retrospectives of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art provided a reassessment of her extraordinary career, and Yoko continues this movement of deeper appreciation.
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