NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, THE NEW YORKER
“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Here, she invents a room of her own, a low table, a Persian cup, inkwell and pen, entering at dawn to write. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start a family.
A series of profound losses mark her life. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again—the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.
About the Author
Patti Smith is the author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids, as well as Woolgathering, M Train, Year of the Monkey, and Collected Lyrics. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. Her global exhibitions include Strange Messenger, Land 250, Camera Solo, and Evidence. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Smith is also the recipient of the ASCAP Founders Award, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and the Legion d’honneur.
Praise For…
“An expansive cradle-to-late-life account of Smith’s experiences over eight decades. One of the marvels of 'Bread of Angels’ is that. . . . it is remarkably fresh, with long sections on subjects about which Smith has rarely written or even said much publicly . . . enlightening.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Smith’s incantatory voice shines through in this surprisingly revelatory follow up . . . It could be described as Just Kids’ prequel and sequel, moving from Smith’s hardscrabble childhood to the near-present, where a striking twist takes the narrative back to her literal conception . . . casts a potent spell, and you’ll learn as much about the artist from her style as from the stories themselves.”—The Guardian
“Bread of Angels is Smith's most straightforwardly autobiographical book to date . . . her focus this time is her trajectory from a working-class childhood in Pennsylvania and south Jersey into her stage and recording career—which she put on hiatus during her marriage and reignited during her widowhood . . . Veers between elegy and engagement.”—NPR
“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.”—The Hollywood Reporter
“Robert Mapplethorpe took this photograph at a deeply transitional moment. It was between the end of my public life as a performer and the beginning of my time in Detroit with my one true love, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. Robert had taken an image with doves for the cover of the album Wave. Afterwards, I asked him to take another that would reflect the sentiment of the song ‘Dancing Barefoot,’ a love song for Fred and a farewell to the people. This is the photograph he took.”—Vanity Fair
“Bread of Angels augments the list of romantically crumbling places that Smith treasures. Riveting . . .We love her because of her aura of rough authenticity, her earnestness, her seer’s way with words and her occasional snarl.”—The Washington Post
“A fantastic read—a portrait of an artist who was at the heart of New York's counter-cultural scene in the 1970s. Smith writes with her usual vividness about her upbringing. But what radiates most from the book is how she developed her artistic passions from a really young age.”—BBC
“An intimate journey through Smith’s life.”—People
“Mesmerizing. Transcendent. Like Jeanette Walls’ classic, The Glass Castle, Smith’s saga begins with a hardscrabble childhood . . . and unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale. . . . I wish I could simply reprint those pages here—they moved me deeply.”—Los Angeles Times
“If Just Kids is about innocence and ambition, Bread of Angels—a sister to that book . . . deals with the more painful realities of experience. She fills in what the earlier memoir leaves in the background: her childhood, her marriage, her fame . . . Near the end of our conversation, Smith brought up her desire, invoked early in her memoir, to write something in which everyone would find a piece of themselves.’”—The Atlantic
