YOKO
A BIOGRAPHY
Coming April 2025
From the publisher:
John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as the world’s most famous unknown artist. “Everybody knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” She has only been important to history insofar as she impacted Lennon. Throughout her life, Yoko has been a caricature, curiosity, and, often, a villain—an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud. The Lennon/Beatles saga is one of the greatest stories ever told, but Yoko’s part has been missing—hidden in the Beatles’ formidable shadow, further obscured by flagrant misogyny and racism. This definitive biography of Yoko Ono’s life will change that. In this book, Yoko Ono takes centerstage.
This book was nearly a half century in the making. In 1980, David Sheff met Yoko and John when Sheff conducted an in-depth interview with them just months before John’s murder. In the aftermath of the killing, he and Yoko became close as she rebuilt her life, survived threats and betrayals, and went on to create groundbreaking art and music while campaigning for peace and other causes. Drawing from his experiences and interviews with her, her family, closest friends, collaborators, and many others, Sheff shows us Yoko’s nine decades—one of the most unlikely and remarkable lives ever lived. It shows Ono’s place in history and her profound influence on art, music, feminism and activism.
From Publisher’s Weekly
“An intimate and perceptive portrait.”
“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.).”
From Booklist
“An indepth and compelling biography”
“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.”
From the New York Times
21 Books Coming in March
YOKO by David Sheff
Sheff first interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, months before the former Beatle was murdered. He and Ono stayed connected; now he’s produced a capacious biography, foregrounding her work as an avant-garde artist and musician and attempting, once and for all, to banish the stereotyping that has shadowed her for decades.
From the New York Times
YOKO by David Sheff
In 1980, Sheff interviewed Yoko Ono and John Lennon for Playboy months before the Beatle’s death. Sheff has maintained a friendship with Ono since, developing a closeness that enriches this biography, which aims to demystify and offer a defense of the enigmatic and divisive artist. It covers her solitary childhood in Tokyo, struggles with heroin addiction, romance with Lennon and more, lifting the veil on her irreverent and uncompromising approach to art.