09/30/2026
My Friend John Lennon: Exile, Memory, and the long and winding road to New York
“I was not born in New York. I was born in a place where saying New York could get you in trouble.” This is how Henry Ballate’s My Friend John Lennon begins. The sentence seems simple, but it contains almost the entire book: two geographies, two systems of life, and a distance the narrator will spend decades crossing. Between a small Cuban town and Manhattan’s Upper West Side unfolds an autobiography in which John Lennon functions less as a character than as a presence—an invisible interlocutor accompanying the author from childhood to the city where he eventually makes his home....
“I was not born in New York. I was born in a place where saying New York could get you in trouble.” This is how Henry Ballate’s My Friend John Lennon begins. The sentence seems simple, but it conta…