John Lennon, 1980 and me: an appreciation of Kevin Barry's Beatlebone

Lorraine Berry was 17 when Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Kevin Barry’s acclaimed novel Beatlebone, about the musician’s experiments with primal therapy on a remote island just before his death, stirred up personal memories of that shocking autumn

The eighth of December has always been an easy date for me to remember: my parents married on that day in 1962, and John Lennon was assassinated in 1980, when I was 17.

“You never get past what happens to you when you’re 17,” says John Lennon in Kevin Barry’s recent novel Beatlebone. I don’t count myself among the believers of that view, but reading Barry’s book skirred me back to being 17 so often that time lost its boundaries while I read.

Related: Beatlebone by Kevin Barry review – a darkly wry trip to Beatle Island

Related: Kevin Barry: ‘I want to go as wild as I can within my stories’

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