The legendary Patti Smith has shared details of her new memoir, “Bread of Angels”, which will be published on 4 November.
Smith, 78, made the announcement on Instagram alongside an image of the poet-writer-musician with her parents as a young adult, writing: “This is with my mother and father who inspired much of my next book Bread of Angels. The memoir, a bright and dark dance of life, will be published on November 4th, by Random House.”
“Bread of Angels” is Smith’s third memoir after the wonderful “Just Kids” in 2010 and the mesmerizing “M Train” in 2015.
In “Just Kids,” winner of the 2010 National Book Award, Smith looked back on her early years in New York City and her romance and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Meanwhile, “M Train” was a chronicle of Smith’s later years following the huge success of her album ‘Horses’ in 1975 and the 40 years that came after which were tragically punctuated by the losses of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, her brother Todd Smith, and Mapplethorpe - who all died within the space of a few weeks in 1994.
The synopsis for “Bread of Angels” reads: “The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.”
It continues: “As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again - the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.”
The book's release date is deeply personal, coinciding with Mapplethorpe's birthday and the anniversary of Fred Smith's death.
Later this year, Smith will spend time on the road celebrating the 50th anniversary of her seminal debut album, ‘Horses’ - which features hits like ‘Gloria’ and ‘Redondo Beach’. ‘Horses’ has appeared in numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time and was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry in 2009.
Smith collapsed on stage in Brazil in January and later wrote on Instagram that she suffered “some post migraine dizziness.” The incident has not stopped her from planning her upcoming tour in Europe, which starts on 1 July in Germany and will take her to Italy, Ireland, UK, Belgium, Norway and France, where she’ll round off the EU leg of her tour on 21 October at L’Olympia in Paris.
