David Sheff
YOKO: A biography
New York City, USA: Simon & Schuster, 2025
384 pp., 23.5 x 16 x 3.2 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown
This new title - out last week - purports to set the record straight on Yoko Ono, and to examine her life and work beyond the impact on John Lennon and Beatles lore. I hope this is true.
Sheff interviewed Ono and Lennon almost forty-five years ago, in what became Lennon’s final substantial interview before his murder*. They were promoting a collaborative record (Double Fantasy, 1980), but most of the questions were for John.
The YOKO dust jacket blurb notes that Sheff became close friends with Ono after that interview (mirroring the way that Elliot Mintz entered the inner circle a decade prior), which would make this the closest to an authorized biography that we’re likely to get, particularly with the artist being 92 years old.
Three years ago Donald Brackett published
Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, which also set out to more-fairly evaluate Ono’s contributions to Art, Activism and music. I wrote at the time:
“Despite declarations that Ono's work needed to be viewed outside the lens of being a Beatle wife- the majority of the book is occupied with Ono's fourteen years with John Lennon (which amounts to just over 15% of her 89 years). To use music as a quantifiable example, she has released nine solo studio albums since his death in 1980 and only four prior."
The press release for this title makes note of Ono’s nine decades, so hopefully the forty-five years after Lennon’s death is more than a coda in this new title.
I won’t get a chance to read it for a while, but the early reviews are promising:
“Sheff’s book is as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester... He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass.”
- The New York Times Book Review
“In this unfiltered, unvarnished portrait of the artist, Sheff succeeds magnificently in bringing one of popular music’s most divisive and misunderstood personae to life.…Yoko is required reading for die-hard Beatles fans and music lovers, to be sure, but it’s also a master class about assembling the evidence and rethinking the manner in which we think about our culture’s most iconic figures.”
- Salon
“Until now, books on Ono have largely been limited to sketchy histories from a former tarot card reader or a takedown by a dismissed assistant. YOKO is the first significant biography of the Japanese-born artist... The strength of Sheff’s book is simple journalism, connecting the dots that existed only vaguely before YOKO.”
-Washington Post
*Originally for Playboy magazine, the long-form interview has subsequently been endlessly repackaged with various different titles: All We Are Saying: The Last Major interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Yoko Ono: The Final Testament, The Playboy Interviews with John & Yoko, etc.
