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Patti Smith is one of those artists who defy categorization. A poet, a writer, a singer, a songwriter, and a portraitist, she defined the punk rock scene of the ’70s and to this day continues blessing fans with avant-garde performances that many claim border on the transcendent. Smith’s latest endeavor? A memoir titled Bread of Angels, which adds to a long list of books by the creative that include the internet-breaking 2010 release Just Kids, M Train (the audiobook version of which earned Smith a Grammy Award nomination in the best spoken word album category), and The Coral Sea, a metaphor-laden tribute to her one-time romantic and professional partner Robert Mapplethorpe.
Bread of Angels is now available to shop at Amazon in hardcover, paperback, made-for-Kindle, or audiobook form (you can score the latter for just 99 cents with an Audible membership). In the three days since its release, the memoir has already clinched the #1 bestseller spot in Amazon’s Rock Music genre. Inside, you’ll come across some of the National Book Award winner’s most intimate recollections to date — as sweeping in scope as they are pivotal to understanding the woman behind the accolades.
‘Bread of Angels’ by Patti Smith
It feels like Smith leaves no stone left unturned here, detailing everything from the first steps she took across the kitchen floor of her childhood home (“I gravitated toward [my father] though it was my mother who was ever present, ever dominant,” she writes of this milestone moment and others like it) to the string of diseases she suffered from in her early years (“mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence,” Smith recalls, adding that her father “saved [her] as an infant” through his care) to the shock that came with learning that this man was not biologically related to her.
Bread of Angels is jam-packed with close to eight decades’ worth of memories, and though Smith also uses it as a chance to touch on her aforementioned relationship with Mapplethorpe, it’s not as intense of an examination as that of Just Kids. Instead, anchoring Smith’s reminiscences of young adulthood through middle age in the book is her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith — a successful guitarist for the rock band MC5 — whom she met at a very fruitful part of her own life, while touring after the release of her debut studio album Horses.
‘Horses’ by Patti Smith
“When we first met, I had no idea who he was, but I knew instantly he would be my life. Such is the terrible mystery of love, that draws us from all that we know,” Smith shares in Bread of Angels, disarming readers with her unique ability to pull them into the spaces of her past, as if they shared her exact history.
Smith’s newest, 288-page work is about love and art, about making mistakes and learning hard truths. It’s also a piece about loss — a kind of elegy to grief itself and the lifelong effects it has on a person (Smith lost Mapplethorpe in March 1989, her husband in November 1994, and her brother a month later).
Throughout it all, Patti Smith kept on writing.
