In 1969, an angry and exhausted John Lennon surveyed the wreckage of the Beatles' most contentious recording session. Lennon — forever the Liverpool lad when it came to criticism — called it "the shittiest load of badly recorded shit" the world's greatest band had ever produced. Before they brought in Phil Spector to turn it into Let It Be, Lennon mulled another option: release the whole mess as-is. He wanted to tear down the myth of the Beatles; let them be seen failing, as the non-gods they were.

That didn't happen with Let It Be, which was overproduced to within an inch of its life and released shortly after the band had broken up. But it may be what happened with Go Set a Watchman, the purported sequel to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Because of course Watchman is actually a first draft, the writer's equivalent of a mediocre recording session — and with its pro-segregation arguments and one casual instance of domestic violence, it's safe to say this particular recording session has not aged well.

The extremely secretive, fast-tracked release of Watchman has prompted fears of an overreaching lawyer nudging an isolated 89-year-old woman into publishing a manuscript of dubious provenance. But the one thing her publishers Harper Collins have repeatedly insisted is that Lee's mind is still as sharp as a tack. She'd insisted on releasing it exactly as-is, not even caring to make the so-called sequel's details mesh with Mockingbird (was Tom Robinson acquitted or wasn't he?), not caring that many of the passages are identical to ones in Mockingbird.

So what if Lee was actually eager to release something that would tear down her own legend? What if the strong-willed tomboy behind literature's greatest tomboy is actually trolling us all?

Up to a million Mockingbird fans, myself included, are still trying to make sense of what we read last week. We skipped merrily through the first 70 pages or so, hailing Lee's champagne-dry wit like an old friend — even as it became clear that the old friend didn't really know where she was going, and was just recounting childhood anecdotes in a similar style to Mockingbird.

We furrowed our brows around page 100, when Atticus Finch attends a meeting at his courthouse — aha, here's that racist old Atticus we were warned about. Grown-up Scout — now known mostly as Jean Louise Finch — watches in secret as Maycomb citizens gather to fume about the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision (never here named) that mandated school integration in the segregated south. Atticus blandly introduces a speaker whose violently racist rhetoric is paraphrased.

But Atticus doesn't wander around ranting like a bigot from this point on, though it might have been better for the narrative if he had. I was fascinated by the concept of a Fox News-watching Atticus Finch, or his 1950s equivalent, but that's not really what we get. Scout is distraught at what she overheard, but largely limits her response to fading into childhood nostalgia again — only this time without the dry wit.

I won't exactly spoil the end, but suffice to say there are talkative confrontations all around, the NAACP is repeatedly trashed, and a dreadfully paternalistic tone arrives like cavalry in a Confederate war film. Scout comes to an epiphany of sorts, not at all the one we'd reach, guided by strong southern men. And this is, perhaps, the hardest part to take. The headlines all focused on Atticus' racist quotes, but what about Lee's stand-in?

Scout admits she felt nauseous and angry when the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on school integration came down. She agrees with Atticus at one point "that they" [Southern blacks] are "backward, that they're illiterate, that they're dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they're infants and they're stupid, some of them."

She only disagrees, she adds, on their essential humanity and need for hope. She claims to be color blind, but makes only the barest of attempts to communicate with her old maid Calpurnia.

Worst of all, Jean-Louise's uncle Jack literally slaps some sense into her — with an effect that's portrayed as ultimately both positive and calming. After that, he becomes the narrative's nice guy. Victims of domestic violence may want to skip this book.

"She struggled to keep from fainting, to keep from vomiting, to keep her head from spinning." -Scout describing the reader experience — Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) July 18, 2015

So here we are, with an almost intolerably ambiguous situation surrounding the release of Go Set a Watchman, and an intolerably ambiguous situation within it. For Uncle Jack hasn't come to change her pro-integration mind, but he has come to drop this knowledge bomb on Jean Louise: "As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God."

Now there's a meta line. As we grew up, almost unknown to ourselves, we confused Atticus Finch with God — even though, as Malcolm Gladwell argued in this very prescient piece from 2009, Atticus was clearly part of the Southern establishment. Even on the evidence of Mockingbird alone, the "courthouse ring" ran Maycomb in a paternalistic, law-abiding, almost liberal manner. It kept the legal side of Jim Crow firmly in place even as they protected defendants from lynchings.

Lee has said she based Atticus on her father, A.C. Lee, who was not initially a fan of civil rights. The closing conversation between Atticus and Jean Louise reads like a spare-no-blushes report of their political conversations, in which her father is directly compared to Hitler. It seems uncomfortably strange that a writer who spent decades shunning the public eye would suddenly release what amounts to the literary equivalent of a talk-show confessional.

But the woman who hid from society like Boo Radley does not necessarily represent the real Nelle Harper Lee. In her teens and twenties in the 1940s, Nelle Harper Lee wore a bomber jacket, smoked a pipe and used language described as "salty." She dropped out of college, went to New York, hung out with the artsy set, stole quarters from parking meters and tried to bash truths out of a typewriter.

A decade later, one of the most beautiful bundle of truths ever to be rendered as a novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, tumbled out of that typewriter. The world fell in love with Atticus and Scout Finch; Atticus became even more god-like when chiseled in marble by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie. One recent critic called him a "plaster saint." He's the ultimate icon of fatherhood and the law, and it seems clear now that's never what he was intended to be.

And yet his fame would not recede. In the 1960s, and ever since, Mockingbird was as big a brand in its branch of the arts as the Beatles were in theirs. Both still earn millions of dollars a year. Only one is taught in 75% of American schools. And meanwhile, only one person in the world — its author — knew that all this hero worship was a species of sham. She knew for decades that both Scout and Atticus were destined for disappointing ends that twisted idealism out of recognition. That's the kind of knowledge that leaves scars if you're the only one to carry it for too long.

So here finally comes Watchman, pouring kerosene on the whole Mockingbird myth by showing us the end of that road. No fairy tale ending, but a distraught, disillusioned, States' rights-supporting Scout and a reactionary racist Atticus.

Jean Louise has to learn to see her father as a flawed human defending a much, much slower path to civil rights than the one the country was on. Similarly, I think — I hope — Lee is directing us to see Atticus as he likely would have been at that time of extremism, to see history as it really was. Let's not get wrapped up in the sentimental side, the book says. White Southerners got scared and turned ugly during civil rights. Here's how it looked when you weren't a child.

It's a hard but important set of lessons to learn. Great writers hailed as the Beatles of their generation weren't perfect, and neither are fathers. Great books take a lot of emotional excavation. The past is messy and often embarrassing, and we often build gods by mistake. But in literature, as in life, the search for the truth is paramount. Let that, then, be the final legacy of Nelle Harper Lee.