YOKO

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 for Playboy 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.