‘How should I cast my soul?’ Patti Smith’s intimate new memoir is a quest for her true self

Patti Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels, arrives on a significant date. On November 4, 1946, Smith’s artistic soulmate and first true love, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, was born. Forty-eight years later, on the same day, her “king among men”, beloved husband and fellow musician, Fred “Sonic” Smith, died of a heart attack.

It seems entirely fitting that this most intimate, comprehensive book – a decade in the making – should be published on such a hallowed day, almost 50 years exactly since her debut album, Horses, was released.

“The hourglass overturns,” she writes in the opening pages, shattering the illusion of time. “Each grain a word that erupts into a thousand more, the first and last moments of every living thing.”

Like her poetry, Smith’s life writing is profound and illuminating. The award-winning Just Kids (a reader-voted New York Times best book of the 21st century) details her extraordinary relationship with Mapplethorpe, as the two establish their artistic careers in New York during the 1970s. M Train and Year of the Monkey offer insights into her spiritual outlook and creative process as she contemplates the passing of time while travelling the world. Devotion explores the business of writing as a call to action that keeps her from being subsumed by the work of others.

Bread of Angels folds all of this together, weaving reverie, dreams, visions and images into an autobiographical tale of deep love, unbearable loss, fortitude and artistic practice. Inevitably, some of the details appear in Smith’s previous works, but here she spins them anew, casting a more intimate light, achieving a greater sense of completion. Loosely arranged around the recurring motif of the “rebel hump”, ultimately this book is the story of Smith’s quest for her true self. It follows her on a journey of individuation, through one painful growth period after another, as she strives to disguise the “miniature Quasimodo” that lurks, metaphorically, inside her body. Over the decades, Smith edges her way around her “unbecoming” hump, harnessing her innate curiosity and powerful imagination into a foundation of unshakeable self-belief and self-possession. An inimitable force, she develops a level of conviction that borders on hubris yet rests on humility, as she takes her cues from the spirit world. Naturally reflective, with a questioning mind, Smith continually wonders who she is and who she is becoming. At the same time, she resists self-doubt and refuses compromise. “I always felt like myself,” she writes. “And there were times when I didn’t identify with anybody.” Her physical image develops accordingly. Now almost 79, with her wild grey hair, soulful, smiling eyes and an arresting gaze, Smith possesses the hard-won beauty of wisdom. She is a younger woman on the cover of her new book: alluring and ethereal, her introspective expression contrasting with a gesture of supplication. The photograph, taken by Mapplethorpe for her 1979 album, Wave, was intended to capture the essence of Dancing Barefoot, her love song for Fred – and to bid her fans farewell on the eve of her retirement. Like the book it now adorns, the image radiates both intimacy and mystery, and carries the shiver of a spell. Patti Smith performing Dancing Barefoot, her love song for her husband Fred, in 1979. Quivering with meaning Beginning with her childhood, Bread of Angels recalls Smith’s life through significant events and personal experiences that quiver with meaning. It spans her impoverished upbringing in Philadelphia and her pivotal role as a post-punk revolutionary in New York, to family life in Michigan with Fred – and finally her return, through grief, to writing, travel and performance. Throughout, Smith navigates the world by symbols and synchronicity, finding sacred patterns and purpose where others might see only luck or coincidence. At seven, a dangerous bout of scarlet fever is a “mystical illness” to be conquered so she can atone for stealing from a friend who dies of lupus. At ten, a broken foot is a reminder to keep a clear head. During a growth spurt, she finds affinity with the local weed trees. “You are my bamboo, I would whisper, the princesses of the train yard.” Smith was born in Chicago, with bronchial distress, on December 30, 1946: to Beverly, a widowed waitress, and her second husband, Grant, a returning soldier weakened by malaria. A sickly but spirited girl, she grew up in condemned housing with three younger siblings. Talkative and curious, Smith led her brother and sisters in elaborate games, throwing herself into boisterous play, fending off the local bullies, finding solace in quiet pockets of nature with the precious books that fed her inner world. Entranced by her favourite fairy tales, she would toss her pocket money into the overgrown garden of an abandoned cottage in the hope it would transform into gold, and once spent the morning communing with a snapping “king” turtle instead of going to school. A social studies project initiated her interest in Buddhism. She felt the presence of spirits in the fields around her home and believed in the magical properties of material objects. Reluctant to lose her sense of wonder, she resolved to stay connected to these more visionary realms as she grew older, like “a singular traveler in search of the garden of childhood’s hour”. On a family outing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 13-year-old Smith came across the work of Picasso and vowed to dedicate herself to the transformative power of art. Adolescence brought poetry and music in the shape of Oscar Wilde, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, French poet Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan. But at 19, while training to be a schoolteacher, Smith was prematurely wrenched into adulthood through pregnancy. Faced with little choice for her child, she arranged an adoption and underwent a lonely and difficult birth. Physically and emotionally scarred, dismissed from college, she packed a suitcase, turned her back on her family, and boarded a bus for New York: heartbroken, but intent on keeping her promise to Picasso. The year was 1967. Just Kids In the city, Smith met Mapplethorpe. The pair became key players in New York’s vibrant community of visionaries and creatives, while embarking on an intense relationship. Eventually, his attraction to men split them up, but the pair remained deeply bound to each other within the socially and culturally progressive arts movements of the late 60s and early 70s.