Entertainment For Lively Minds
9 volume Lennon biography - 47 years in the writing!
Posted by Mark JF on 17 August 2011 - 1:28pm.
A friend of mine has pointed out that someone is currently writing a 9 volume biography of John Lennon. The first 2 volumes have been published and lots of research done, taking so far (wait for it) 26 years. The remaining 7 volumes have been storyboarded and the author estimates it will take a further (you might not want to wait for this) 21 years.
That's 47 years to write a biography of someone who lived for 40 years. The author, Jude Kessler, calls it an "augmented biography." It smells to me more like posthumous stalking! Any views?
And does anyone really want 9 volumes-worth of biography of anyone? It's also interesting that the cover presents it as a novel about JL. Hmmm.
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Think I'll stick with the Philip Norman
as that's my favourite of the many Lennon books I've read. Other opinions may vary
John Lennon
I don't really feel like I need to know any more about him. I don't need to know that much about anyone!
This may not seem fair, but the further we get from someones death, the less valid I find a new biography of them.
Life's too short
- his and mine.
"posthumous stalking"...
...it certainly sounds that way to me! Who in their right mind would want such a thing? Even if, say, Peter Ackroyd or Richard Holmes or Dickens himself wrote it we STILL wouldn't need a work of this length. It's madness.
I'm even sceptical - very sceptical - about whether the world needs Mark Lewison's forthcoming Beatles epic. There might be odd corners - tiny, obscure little nooks - which might make a few more good essays or magazine pieces, but does anyone need another tombstone sized biog in a world where even Pete Best has written at least two autobiographies, where people have written books solely on the Hamburg recordings, the Get Back sessions, this tour, that tour, Stu Sutcliffe, encyclopedias of Beatle hangers-on, the Johnny Gentle gigs, the Beatles in Ireland (there's TWO books on the Beatles in Ireland for goodness sake! The content being three or four gigs in the 60s, Lennon buying an island off Galway and Wings recruiting Henry McCullough from Portstewart. That's TWO whole books!)...
If I was Mark Lewison I'd be asking myself 'isn't it time I did something else with my life?' He's surely earned his MBE and visiting professorship of Liverpool University already.