Leslie's format, in which he uses particular songs as entry points to discuss particular points along the Beatles timeline and beyond it, is not original. Neither is his focus on the relationship between John and Paul. Oddly, it's his background in psychology that makes John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs a compelling new entry in the massive Beatles library. The author didn't perform any new interviews for his book. He did all his research in the pages of other authors' works. But unlike most of those writers, Leslie really manages to make us feel the intimacy of Lennon and McCartney's relationship.
These stories have all been told before, and for those of us who've read more than a couple of Beatles books, they will seem overly familiar, to say the least. But Leslie made me feel like I was reading them for the first time as he applied his knowledge of psychology to the machinations of the two main Beatles' relationship. He does not do this academically by tossing around a lot of clinical terms to give himself the whiff of authority, and he doesn't do it by playing glib, smug armchair shrink. He simply fleshes out the story by exploring Paul and John's motivations as they navigate their creativity, their stardom, their drug use, their band's break up and aftermath, their relationships with others, and their extremely complicated relationship with each other. He doesn't shove theories down the readers' throats, insisting that he's finally cracked some grand mystery behind the intensity of their friendship in the early days of Beatlemania or the intensity of Lennon's ire when that friendship started to dissolve. He does lay out all the possible reasons for why Paul—often emotionally guarded, often eager to please, often controlling, often nastier and blunter than his benign persona suggests—and John—often caustic, often vulnerable, often violent, often needy—were the way they were.
This is not necessarily new either, and many of the explanations will again be extremely familiar to Beatles readers: John and Paul's shared grief over the deaths of their mothers, their shared traumas and triumphs as the two most famous pop stars ever, their desires to be the best at what they do. And, in one instance that was new to me, there may have been a one-way attraction, as Yoko Ono once offered the very plausible theory that John may have harbored a legit desire to have a sexual relationship with Paul, which is both sweet and heartbreaking.
But, again, Leslie makes it all feel new by really getting into how such experiences shape a person, and he does so with sensitivity, humility, and humanity. He conveys how much he loves their music, sometimes by slipping into charming and disarming first-person point of view. Most significantly, he allows John and Paul to speak for themselves by selecting just the right quotes from them to illuminate their own states of mind. Honestly, I've never felt more like I knew John Lennon and Paul McCartney than I did after finishing John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. It moved me.
