Lennon was presented in the book as a talented but deeply flawed man who manipulated people and relationships throughout his life, flinging them aside when they were no longer useful to him.

Goldman also claims that when Lennon started making music again in 1980 following a long seclusion, he was not oblivious to Manhattan's cocaine-fueled disco scene.

Goldman alleges further that on December 8, 1980 (the day of Lennon's murder) not only did the singer's cocaine-snorting warrant plastic surgery, but he was in such bad physical condition from drug abuse and lack of exercise that during his autopsy the medical examiner recorded observations to that effect, overlooking the five bullet wounds momentarily.

Goldman further asserts that this drug-addled, dangerously unhealthy isolation was a result of Lennon's natural laziness and dependence on strong women throughout his life.

Goldman does show genuine respect for Lennon's musical achievements with the Beatles and his solo work (although he dismisses the widely acclaimed "Imagine").

[2][3] The overarching theme of the book is to debunk the notion that Lennon retired from the music business for five years, from 1975 until the rehearsals for his 1980 comeback album, Double Fantasy, to live as a "househusband," as Rolling Stone magazine and Playboy described him, and to raise the couple's son, Sean.

Wiener also reveals that Goldman worked closely with the Lennons' former assistant Fred Seaman, who had served five years probation for grand larceny after pleading guilty to looting John's personal belongings and diaries after his death.

[7][8] Goldman depicts Paul McCartney in an extremely positive light, as being the only true talent among the Beatles, and the man who made the band able to function.

On January 16, 1980, customs officials in Japan found 7.7 ounces (218.3 g) of cannabis in McCartney's luggage as he and the other musicians in Wings tried to enter the country for a concert tour.

She allegedly made overseas telephone calls to government officials she knew with the hope that he would be arrested, thereby giving her a good excuse to forbid her husband from communicating with his friend.

These readings would determine seemingly trivial choices of Lennon's life, such as which route their limousine would take to transport them home from the studio or which day was most propitious on which to record music, but were, in fact, according to Goldman, often part of Ono's constant machinations.

[1] In Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography, there appears the following quote from The Beatles' record producer George Martin: "I think it is iniquitous that people can libel the dead.

[28] The October 20, 1988, issue of Rolling Stone lambasted the book in a lengthy and extensively researched article by David Fricke and Jeffrey Ressner, "Imaginary Lennon".

[29] The reviewers described the book as "riddled with factual inaccuracies, embroidered accounts of true events that border on fiction and suspect information provided by tainted sources".

Among the factual errors listed by Rolling Stone: Louis Menand in The New Republic described the sourcing of Goldman's book as "vague and unreliable".

[31] Goldman denounced the Rolling Stone article as "a farrago of groundless or insignificant charges designed to discredit my biography of John Lennon".

He also mocked what he called "the stupidity of the [Newsweek] magazine employees who were assigned the task of smearing me and my book", and concluded by saying that Sante was "a young man of no reputation in the field of popular culture".

Yet Goldman pinpointed Lennon's almost clinical need for domination by a strong woman; the dark ambiguity of a man of peace being governed by violence, either vented or repressed; the unmistakable decline in his work after he left England in 1971; and the instinctive need to believe in a force greater than himself, which led him from guru to guru, each obsession spilling into disillusionment and creative despair.

[33]Historians Michael Brocken and Melissa Davis took a more nuanced perspective on Goldman's book than most critics, writing in The Beatles Bibliography that "...the primary research concerning Lennon's early years was of the very highest quality; it was simply not well served by its author.

An October 1988 episode of Saturday Night Live featured a sketch revolving around why Goldman wrote the book, claiming it was in retaliation for the Beatles kicking him out of the band in 1962.