The Lives of John Lennon released to the public. Lennon's widow Yoko Ono threatened to sue for libel, claiming the book made her briefly consider suicide, but never pursued any legal action, later explaining that she wanted to maintain a positive attitude and that her lawyers had advised her a civil action would only draw more attention to the book. Lennon's first wife Cynthia Lennon denounced the book, stating "Every single person was annihilated. My mother was called a bulldog and a domineering woman, which was nothing—"nothing"—like my mother. And he called "me" a spaniel. I thought, I'd rather be a spaniel than a Rottweiler,
The Lives of John Lennon "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." Sante good-naturedly replied that Goldman's tirade proved that the book was a gigantic, humorous "put-on". Author Phillip Norman, whose own biography of Lennon ("John Lennon: The Life") was published 20 years after "The Lives of John Lennon", described Goldman's book as "malevolent" and "risibly ignorant". On their 1988 album "Rattle and Hum", U2 attacked Goldman's allegations about Lennon in the song "God Part