Patti Smith Announces New Memoir ‘Bread of Angels’
Ilya Savenok for Getty Images, Courtesy of Tibet House US
While Patti Smith has already chronicled her storied life and career in two celebrated memoirs, the iconic musician and writer still has much to share. Today, she’s made that clear by announcing Bread of Angels, a third memoir centering scenes from her private life, largely away from the stage.
Smith’s National Book Award-winning 2010 book Just Kids captured her youth in New York’s underground and relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and 2015’s M Train focused on her life since Horses, with a particular view to the losses she endured through those years. A description from Random House promises that Bread of Angels will top these haunting classics as her “most intimate” book to date, exploring her childhood in Philadelphia and New Jersey and later her move to Michigan to start a family with her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith.
“As Smith suffers profound losses,” Random House details, “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.”
“It took a decade to write this book, grappling with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime. I’m hoping that people will find something they need,” Smith said in a statement. In a post to her notoriously poetic Instagram feed, she described the offering as “a bright and dark dance of life.” It’s set to arrive on November 4, both the anniversary of Smith’s death and Mapplethorpe’s birthday.
Learn more about Bread of Angels and pre-order the book at penguinrandomhouse.com. On March 26, icons like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Karen O and many more united at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium for People Have The Power: Celebrating The Music Of Patti Smith; read more about the star-studded tribute concert here.
