Early in this Leonard Cohen biography, the writer Sylvie Simmons quotes Virginia Woolf, who said, “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.” It struck me as a bit of disclaimer as, even at 570 pages, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen is a comprehensive but not exhaustive biography. Mind you, given Cohen’s extraordinary life to date, I doubt even someone with the patience of a Talmudic scholar and the promise of a boxed set could hope to approximate the complete story.
This biography is a definitive work, masterfully told. It is a rollicking good read packed with hair-raising anecdotes, broad history, fine attention to detail and big-hearted humour that profiles the life of an extraordinary artist who would seem to have embodied scores of those thousands of creative selves.
Denise Donlon is a former president of Sony Music Canada, vice-president of MuchMusic and MuchMoreMusic, and executive director of CBC English radio. She is currently producing a new TV show that will debut in May 2013.
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