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 centre stage.

Yoko’s life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey.  Yoko  spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime imaginable: breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history.

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.

Yoko  is a harrowing, moving, propulsive and vastly entertaining biography of a woman whose story has never been accurately told. The book not only rehabilitates Yoko Ono’s reputation but elevates it to iconic status.

‘What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong?’

Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery.

Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets.

With haunting candour, David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3am phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the attempts at rehab. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll.

But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic. This story is a first: a teenager’s addiction from the parent’s point of view – a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope.  

Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.

Read the other side of Nic Sheff’s bestselling memoir, Tweak.

Praise for Beautiful Boy:-
‘A brilliant, harrowing, heartbreaking, fascinating story, full of beautiful moments and hard-won wisdom. This book will save a lot of lives and heal a lot of hearts’. Anne Lamott
‘An important book… moving, timely and startlingly beautiful.’  Richard Branson