Yoko: A Biography

Bestseller Sheff (Beautiful Boy) aims in this illuminating and affectionate biography to look beyond Yoko Ono’s reputation as an “inscrutable seductress, a manipulating con artist” and a “fraud... who broke up the greatest band in history.” Drawing on extensive conservations with Ono stretching back to 1980, when he first interviewed her and John Lennon, Sheff traces her creative life from an isolated childhood in Tokyo spent drawing and writing to her studies in art, literature, and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence and her first art exhibitions in early 1960s New York City. Along the way, Ono developed an irreverent artistic style that interrogated feminist concerns at a moment of moralizing conservatism, Sheff writes. She and Lennon met when he attended one of her exhibits in 1966. After divorcing their spouses, they married in 1969, and went on to collaborate on such projects as the 1971 song “Imagine” (though Ono went uncredited as cowriter until 2017, an omission Lennon attributed to his own egotism). Sheff adeptly traces the familiar beats of Ono and Lennon’s love story from its earliest days through the fallout following his murder and beyond, while also providing a comprehensive and enriching analysis of Ono’s art career, highlighting in particular how she helped pioneer the notion of art and performance cocreated with an audience. It makes for an intimate and perceptive portrait. (Apr.)