Patti Smith opens the final door of her life story

With “Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith has finally given readers the long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s “Just Kids.” Unlike “M Train” (2015) and “Year of the Monkey” (2019), both of which mixed memoir with surrealism, “Bread of Angels” is presented as the next chapter of her life following the death of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, in 1994, and Smith (Patti)’s return to performance, recording and public life.

But this is Patti Smith, so nothing will be conventional or usual, at least within the narrow scope of the definitions of those words. “Bread of Angels” does take readers to March 9, 1976, the night Smith met the love of her life, standing next to a radiator in a hot dog emporium in downtown Detroit. But it goes back further than that, and even further than the sketch of her childhood presented in “Just Kids.” Smith has always opened doors, and here she is opening them wider.

Smith digs deeply and with care and considerable skill, bringing readers deeply into her childhood. We learn more about her parents, their parents, her siblings, her friends and neighbors, and their adventures, trials and tribulations. It’s artfully constructed, the kind of meandering where everything has a purpose. You might at first think, “Why is she telling us about this?” But hold that thought, because she will make herself clear either a few pages or a few chapters later.

It’s not surprising that Smith manages to transport the reader alongside her into the fields where she played and hid and disappeared, where she was the leader of a small gang of kids, where she had a conversation with a turtle and ended up hours late for school. She doesn’t need many words to create an entire landscape, and repeatedly, the reader will find that they’re daydreaming right alongside our heroine. It’s actually quite astonishing.

If you have followed Smith’s work for any period of time, you will already know some — but not all — of these stories, connections, and intersections. But now she is telling them in one place, collecting them in order to connect the dots more explicitly. She has always trusted that her readers and followers would be able to pay attention and keep up, but after more than 50 years, she is right to want to retell her stories. This not only helps the newer fans who may not have heard these tales before, but it also allows Smith to retain control of her life story and legacy.

The stories Smith shares in “Bread of Angels” don’t just commemorate milestones — like the time her mother told her she could, at age 10, no longer play outside in the summer without a shirt on, or when her father decided to take the family to the Philadelphia Art Museum, meeting Bob Dylan or the Dalai Lama — but the explorations of her mind as a child that she shares here allow you to better understand and more deeply appreciate the surrealistic worlds she presents in “M Train” and “Year of the Monkey.” If you read and loved those books, “Bread of Angels” vividly illustrates the pathway of how she was able to create those stories and her ability to not just create other worlds, but to effortlessly step back and forth between imagination and reality.

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But there is also a reward here in these stories for the faithful that have always been paying attention, the callbacks to things already known and stories already told, whether it’s the night that the barn across the street from her childhood home caught on fire and she was outside with her baby sister Kimberly, an event that inspired the song with the same name, or the time she picked Tibet as a country she wanted to do a social studies report on, her first encounter with Picasso and choosing art as a way of life, her first meeting with Dylan and the cautious friendship that grew, or the time a tipsy Michael Stipe first phoned her on what was her first Valentine’s Day without her husband.

But there are plenty of new stories and enormous revelations, particularly about her family, such as the fact that a temporary health-related quarantine on her maternal grandfather’s farm required threats of legal intervention to have her returned to her parents. Also, Patti is one of those people who can smell ants! The rest should be saved not just because of spoilers but because the real enjoyment of this book is how the story gracefully — and other times, not-so-gracefully, but with deliberation — unfurls. There is so much to unpack, dissect, consider and meditate upon.

It is not as linear a book as “Just Kids,” but that is not by default a negative, because it has a different purpose. As Smith once again explains, in writing “Just Kids,” she was keeping a promise she made to Robert Mapplethorpe to tell their story. “Bread of Angels” is her story, and in choosing to write this book, she was only beholden to her own muses. It feels like sometimes Smith is flipping a telescope, looking through the wide end, making everything focused on one small element, and then flipping it around to show us the wider view. It is a book best read in slow, savored segments and not rushed through multiple successive reads for the purposes of a review.

Smith has been exceedingly private about her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith over the years, and here she maintains that privacy, while still trying to bring the reader further inside their life and love in a way she has not previously. And it’s both interesting and heartbreaking to see that decades later she still feels the need to defend her choice to leave public life — even more so because we learn that her mother, Beverly, who ran her fan club and was often in the front row at her live shows, didn’t understand why her daughter would leave behind so many “golden opportunities.”

(PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP via Getty Images) Patti Smith at the opening of an exhibition dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris on March 24, 2014

She writes, “It seemed to some that I was doing nothing,” and nowadays, there would at least be some segment of fandom and the media who would be applauding her for prioritizing her mental health. (As the music journalist Lisa Robinson once wrote about Smith at the time, Americans do not understand turning away fame.) “Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life,” Smith explains, while telling stories of playing music together for hours, of making a home with precious few possessions, of accommodating the other person’s projects and affinities: For Fred, it was restoring an old boat that would never be made seaworthy; for Patti, it was the creation of a room in their house where she could write and travel inside her mind.

Of course, as with all memoirs, the reader knows how at least some parts end, and so we already know going into this part of the book that her time together with Fred Smith wouldn’t even last two full decades. Here, it feels like Smith is still treading carefully when she states, “His decline was the tragedy of my life,” and that “it profits no one to outline the private battles of a very private man.”

As the author of a book about Patti Smith, I am often asked the kinds of questions that I am in no position to or have no desire to answer, and they’re almost always about the Smith-Smith marriage. It is probably easier to smirk or cast aspersions at the idea of a love for the ages than it is to accept that you have not met that person in your own life. By the time you are reaching the end of “Bread of Angels” and you read “That is what I live for, the mist of his return,” with regards to her late husband, you would have to possess a heart of stone to think unkindly of this particular couple.

“Bread of Angels” is also an elegy, not just for lost loved ones but for times, places and even physical things. Any subscriber to Smith’s delightfully unpredictable newsletter has enjoyed many a video missive where she basically picks up items residing on her desk and displays them to the camera, explaining how she got the item and what it means to her, whether a doll or a book or a figurine or even a stuffed bat (not taxidermied, the toy kind) that her assistant found on the sidewalk. Early in the book, Smith explains, “I always believed in the magical properties of things,” which makes sense given everything we learn about her childhood, when her family had very, very little, and how even those scant possessions would end up missing, destroyed, or left behind.

By the time you reach the book’s end, you will undoubtedly reach the conclusion that another reason for this book is that it is a farewell. Smith is saying goodbye, she is saying thank you, she is offering gratitude for people in her life who stood beside her and helped when she needed it the most. She is making peace with what she has and has not done. It is a chronicle, an accounting, a memento mori. The book is not unnecessarily maudlin but rather sharply present, which is also simply an accurate descriptor for much of Smith’s life and work. She relates many of the times that she did not think she could write or create or even think, but she always manages to find the thread and come back to her art, whether music or visual art or writing. With “Bread of Angels,” one can only hope that it is not her last — she could still write the New York City detective novel she once mused about! — and that Smith keeps following her muse, wherever it takes her next.