Why Is More Than Half of Yoko Ono’s New Biography About John Lennon?

In March 1964, when Yoko Ono was 31, she performed Cut Piece, a piece that she would go on to stage five more times in her life— four times in the 1960s, and once more in 2003, at age 70. In Cut Piece, Ono sits on a stage in her best clothes with a placid expression as she instructs audience members to, one by one, take the pair of scissors she’s placed beside her and cut off a small piece of her clothing. In the ’60s, these performances took menacing turns: male participants, products of the era’s fraught understanding of sexual freedom, felt emboldened to strip Ono bare. Spectators were turned into passive witnesses. 

Cut Piece— perhaps Ono’s greatest work—was lauded as a feminist statement about the subordination of women at a time when feminism had yet to meaningfully pervade the avant-garde. Although the performance testifies to the ease with which women are objectified, it communicates multitudes through the prism of Ono’s body: it also tells the story of her native Japan’s devastation during and after World War II, which she lived through as a child. And, it’s about her relationship with John Lennon, which transformed her private life into a public spectacle, as well as the sacrifice and surrender that Ono, a passionate anti-war activist, considers a precondition for peace. 

Yoko, a new biography about Ono by David Sheff, opens with a prologue about Cut Piece, introducing her—as provocateur, martyr, and social experimenter—through the lens of her own creation. Sheff, who came up as a journalist in the eighties and nineties, knew Ono and Lennon when the latter was still alive, and his previously published interviews with the couple (and, more recently, just Ono) inform large portions of the book. In this sense, Yoko is the closest thing we might get to an authorized biography of the now-92-year-old icon, with Scheff directly positioning her life’s story against the racist and misogynistic narratives to which she has traditionally been attached in popular culture. 

Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles, though she probably helped expedite the inevitable. Her vilification was fueled by the perception of Ono as an exotic temptress, and from a basic refusal to take her seriously. As the haters’ logic goes, her conceptual art is a scam—anyone could place a fruit on a pedestal, as she did with Apple (in 1966, the year she met Lennon), and call it art; her music—which artists like Lady Gaga, RZA, and Bjork have cited as an influence—is abrasive, featuring guttural screams and shrieks that no sane person would want to hear. As punishment for falling in love with Lennon, she would remain in his shadow, simultaneously hyper-visible and unknown. 

In any case, any student of modern pop-cultural history should recognize this tune—and know it’s passé. Oono’s reappraisal began in the nineties, when bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo broke out, their experimental blends of noise and pop hearkening to Ono’s solo projects and her collaborations with Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. In 2002, “Yes Yoko Ono,” the first travelling retrospective of Ono’s work, kicked off its international tour, and in 2015, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a sweeping retrospective, “Yoko Ono: One-Woman Show,” surveying Ono’s output up until 1971, the year she infiltrated MoMA with flyers advertising her own nonexistent exhibition. Sundry magazine profiles (in the New Yorker and Vulture) have been written about Ono since the MoMA show, and at least two books—David Brackett’s Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, (2022) and Madeline Bocaro’s In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono (2021) — predate Scheff’s tome. 

With nostalgia culture arguably at its commercial peak, the Beatles have been dutifully resurrected in several recent projects—like the jukebox rom-com Yesterday (2019), the Peter Jackson-directed documentary series Get Back (2021), and Beatles `64 (2024), a documentary about Beatlemania produced by Martin Scorsese. Next month, the documentary One to One: John & Yoko will be released theatrically in IMAX, an exclusive booking reserved for predicted moneymakers. 

The cynic in me sees Scheff’s biography as part of this wave of investments, expanding the Beatles universe through a kind of feminist revisionist lens that, in simply debunking the myths associated with Ono, shine a much-craved new light on retreaded terrain. More than half of Yoko tracks the tumultuous 14-year-period of Ono’s life with Lennon: their travels and artistic undertakings; their struggles with fame and addiction; and, finally, their blissful last years together between Sean’s birth and John’s death. Distinguishing Scheff’s retelling are original and/or newly gathered testimonies from the couple’s friends, relatives, and colleagues that illuminate and complicate pivotal scenes in Lenono history—their famed “bed-ins” in protest of the Vietnam War; Sean Lennon’s star-studded 9th birthday party; Lennon’s period of separation from Ono dubbed the “lost weekend” (which is also the subject of a 2022 documentary). 

The first quarter of the book, about 60 pages, delves into Ono’s “hybrid” upbringing, to use Sheff’s term: she was born to an elite family, split her early years between Japan and the States, and lived mostly in luxury, except for during the devastating, famine-stricken years of World War II. In New York, she attended Sarah Lawrence College before dropping out and immersing herself in the avant-garde scene, collaborating with John Cage and associating herself with a community of Fluxus artists. 

Scheff’s book is intent on humanizing Ono in relatable terms, responding directly the inscrutable image of her held by her detractors. In doing so, he repeatedly invokes her solitary childhood and the cool indifference of her parents; her inability to feel at home wherever she went—thus her utopian streak; her work’s insistence on the power of imagination. Yet Ono’s appeal, in my mind at least, lies precisely in her resistance to relatability: her fiery refusal to assimilate and adhere to conventions. We see this early on, in her rejection of her parents’ conservative traditions; in her spurning of institutional learning; and, ultimately, in the challenges she posed to the worlds of music and art. Industrious and persistent, Ono epitomized the hustling artist’s lifestyle, seeking out collaborations and negotiating exhibition spaces for her installations, divisive instruction pieces (assembled in her 1964 book Grapefruit) and participatory performances (like Cut Piece). Her ambivalent relationship to motherhood is a much richer throughline than her traumatic childhood, perhaps because original interviews with Ono’s two children—Kyoko Ono Cox, the daughter she had with her second husband, and Sean—contribute heavily to Scheff’s reporting. 

Onophilia pales in comparison to Beatles worship (Lennon alone has dozens of books written about him), so Scheff’s book is by no means unwelcome. It doesn’t break any news or analyze Ono’s output in fresh ways, but it does—if only as a result of catering to Beatles and Lenono stakeholders—make for a compelling romance about interracial love, freedom in the wake of the sexual revolution, and the ways work and intimacy can be intertwined for artistic couples. Like all great loves, John and Yoko’s was, for an outsider looking in, something of a mystery; it’s not “solved” by the end of the book, but rather observed in all its complexity, as ripples still coursing through one woman’s life.