‘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.

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.

Just Kids offers a poignant close-up of this period, chronicling the details of the couple’s formative years together. The new book focuses more on Smith’s spiritual evolution and changing identity within her social milieu during this time. As her musical and artistic circles expanded, she drew on a widening range of influences while staying true to herself, all the while, asking: “how should I cast my soul?”

New York’s burgeoning underground music scene provided the answer. In 1971, Smith began performing her poetry, accompanied by guitarist Lenny Kaye. Before long, she gathered her band and transmuted into a rock’n’roll revolutionary, claiming her territory with thrilling live shows. In 1975, her groundbreaking debut album, Horses, was released to critical acclaim.

With its improvisational direction and Mapplethorpe’s iconic cover photograph, Horses embodied freedom and defiance. Opening with a reworking of Van Morrison’s Gloria, a sexual song clearly intended to be sung by a man, the record confronted the limitations of duality, refused the constraints of convention and issued an explosive challenge to the establishment. Smith was launched as the high priestess of punk and set off on the road with her band, entrancing audiences across America with her bewitching stage presence.

“I had new dark glasses, charms sweet angels stitched on my sleeve,” writes Smith of her new incarnation. “The hyena was showing her wet teeth […] We were touring Horses, riding straight into the future.”

Life-changing love

Four months after the release of Horses, at a party before her show in Detroit, Smith had a momentary but fateful encounter with former MC5 guitarist, Fred “Sonic” Smith. Touring commitments dictated the initial pace of their relationship, but Smith knew this tall, brooding man with the pale blue eyes would alter the course of her life.

After recording her second album, Radio Ethiopia, another turning point occurred in January 1977: supporting roots rock musician Bob Seger in Florida, Smith tumbled from a dangerously high stage and sustained serious injuries. Left with fractures to her skull and spine, she was forced into a lengthy rehabilitation but chose to find divine meaning and creative direction in her accident. Encouraged by Lenny Kaye, she spent her recovery writing poems for what would become her first published volume, Babel.

During this time, her love for Fred deepened. But as she grew stronger, she began to grapple with her need to write in solitude, and the opposing impulse to get back on the road.

In 1979, two more albums later (Easter and Wave, each containing songs either inspired by or co-written with Fred), Smith finally departed from rock'n'roll – after the theft of a tour truck in Chicago.

Exhausted by constant travel between New York and Fred in Detroit, she was no longer writing, drawing or journaling. She interpreted the robbery as an opportunity, and conducted a psychological and emotional audit. “I threw open the carpet of my life,” she writes. “It was time to hold myself accountable trusting there was no harsher judge nor jury.”

In a typically symbolic gesture, towards the end of what proved to be her final show in September, she invited the crowd to swarm the stage, encouraging her fans to replace her by occupying their own central positions instead.

And so, aged 32, Smith arrived at her next point of departure, or her “second declaration of existence”, as she calls it. A few months after her final show, during the leap year of 1980, she and Fred were married in a small, private ceremony at the Mariners’ Church in Detroit, at the time of a full moon, on March 1.

A life of quiet romance

Away from the spotlight, Smith lived a life of quiet romance in St Clair Shores, near Detroit, with her husband. Beyond the confines of time, tied to nobody but each other, the couple fell into their own rhythms, creating a home in a little Belgian-style house, complete with a turret. Here, with her low table, a Moroccan silk cushion and a Persian cup for her mint tea, she found a way to be “entirely myself”, writing and ruminating in the room she called “my vagabondia”.

The couple’s occasionally lonely existence was obscure and authentic. It required Smith to grow into a better version of herself, both as a person and a writer. All the while, her mind and imagination continued to dance, nourishing her internal world while she performed her domestic tasks and renovated a boat with Fred.

In time, the couple had two children, Jackson, born in 1982 and Jesse, born in 1987, and the days took on a different shape. With a family to support, Smith and Fred needed to generate an income. Together, they wrote and recorded Dream of Life (released in 1988) and planned a follow-up album with the working title, Going West.

In March 1989, Mapplethorpe succumbed to complications from HIV in a Boston hospital. Utterly bereft, Smith channelled her grief into The Coral Sea, a loving tribute of prose poetry to the man she refers to as her “artist in life”.

The following year, Fred fell ill. After a few difficult months of sickness, he was admitted to the hospital where his children were born. Aged 46, he died from a heart attack on what would have been Mapplethorpe’s 43rd birthday, November 4, 1994.

Loss and renewed purpose

Smith briefly refers to Fred as a “troubled man” whose health was damaged by drugs in his late teens and twenties. “I was never to penetrate the true nature of those troubles,” she writes, adding “his decline was the tragedy of my life, and it profits no one to outline the private battles of a very private man.”

Heartbroken, she lay her personal king and protector to rest in the church where they married, wearing the expensive black gown she wore when they met. At the memorial service, she sang What a Wonderful World, after hearing it on the car radio on her way there. She didn’t particularly like the song, but Fred had always deemed it hers because of her optimistic nature. Now, it seemed he was insisting she perform it just for him.

By Christmas, Smith had regained enough energy to buy presents for her children, but on her return from the toyshop, she suffered another blow. She came home to the news that her brother Todd had died from a stroke.

Smith was broken by this third, devastating bereavement. She stopped writing, retreated into a state of emptiness, and waited for a sign from Fred. In February 1995, while the snow was falling and her children were asleep, she received a phone call from REM’s singer, Michael Stipe who told her how sorry he was about her husband. Knowing she was alone, he offered to be her Valentine, a kindness which touched her deeply.

Very slowly, with the support of friends, Smith began another journey towards yet another new life back in New York. It was not an easy return. The city had changed beyond recognition since she left, and she was set adrift, wandering through the streets in tears. One day, wearing Fred’s leather jacket, she bumped into photographer Annie Leibovitz. who whisked the grief-stricken, disoriented singer away to her studio. There, they shot what would eventually be the cover photograph for Gone Again, the album first mapped out with Fred as Going West.

Slowly, Smith began to find renewed purpose in the present, and the courage to face her future.

Recognising the rebel hump

The closing chapters of this shimmering memoir pay homage to Smith’s parents, Grant and Beverly, as she recovers long-held secrets regarding her genetic identity and searches for her first, adopted daughter. These interlocking, profoundly moving stories offer the author a certain resolution as she pieces her personal puzzle together, working from the future back into the past.

Shifting, recalibrating, ultimately settling, by tracing “the blood of my mosaic” she is left with a new understanding of herself – and her parents – and is able to locate herself more firmly within the world.

In the concluding pages, from a hotel room in Nice, fittingly overlooking the Bay of Angels, she returns to the motif of the rebel hump as she muses on the ways in which she has changed and not changed over the years.

She imagines a young girl plucking a mirror from the grass. A girl who leaps with joy and lands with delicate certainty – who now accepts the rebel hump, finally recognising its value in a conscious, and loving, act of integration.

Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.