If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, The Hollywood Reporter may receive an affiliate commission.
Patti Smith is one of those artists who defies categorization. A poet, writer, singer, songwriter and portrait painter, she defined the punk rock scene of the 70s and continues today to offer her fans avant-garde performances that many consider to border on the transcendent. Smith’s latest attempt? A memoir entitled Angel Breadwhich adds to a long list of books from the creator that includes the groundbreaking 2010 release Just kids, M-Train (the audiobook version of which earned Smith a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album), and The Coral Seaa metaphor-laden tribute to his former romantic and professional partner Robert Mapplethorpe.
Angel Bread is now available for purchase on Amazon as a hardback, paperback, made for Kindle, or audiobook (you can get the latter for just 99 cents with an Audible subscription). In the three days since its release, the memoir has already landed the #1 bestseller spot in Amazon’s Rock Music genre. Inside, you’ll discover some of the National Book Award winner’s most intimate memories to date – as expansive as they are essential to understanding the woman behind these accolades.
“Bread of Angels” by Patti Smith
It feels like Smith leaves nothing to chance here, detailing everything from the first steps she took on the kitchen floor of her childhood home (“I turned to [my father] even though it was my mother who was always present, always dominant,” she writes of this defining moment and others like it) to the series of illnesses she suffered in her early years (“mine was a Proustian childhood, a childhood of intermittent quarantine and convalescence,” Smith recalled, adding that her father “saved [her] as an infant” thanks to her care) to the shock caused by learning that this man had no biological link with her.
Angel Bread is packed with nearly eight decades of memories, and while Smith also takes the opportunity to address his aforementioned relationship with Mapplethorpe, it’s not as intense an examination as that of Just kids. Instead, Smith’s reminiscences from adulthood to middle age in the book are her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith – a successful guitarist for the rock band MC5 – whom she met at a very fruitful time in her own life, while touring after the release of her first studio album. Horses.
“Horses” by Patti Smith
“When we first met, I had no idea who he was, but I knew immediately that he would be my life. Such is the terrible mystery of love, which draws us from everything we know,” Smith shares in Angel Breaddisarming readers with his unique ability to draw them into the spaces of his past, as if they were sharing his exact story.
Smith’s latest work, 288 pages, is about love and art, making mistakes and learning hard truths. It’s also a play about loss – a sort of elegy to grief itself and the effects it has on a person for life (Smith lost Mapplethorpe in March 1989, her husband in November 1994 and her brother a month later).
All the while, Patti Smith continued to write.
“Bread of Angels” by Patti Smith
