Bread of Angels: A Memoir, Review by Patti Smith – A Road Trip with a Punk Poet | Patti Smith

TArtist memoirs continue to flow post-pandemic, but Patti Smith stands apart. The poet who wrote punk into existence before catapulting to pop stardom and then pursuing fans to raise a family has, in the 21st century, turned to literature and music with such verve that it’s become difficult to pinpoint the medium that suits her best. It hardly matters. Smith, 78, lives and breathes together.

Her latest memoir follows the tightly focused coming-of-age story Just Kids, published to great acclaim in 2010, and the more ruminative M Train in 2015. Bread for Angels splits the difference to create a more traditional autobiography. It can be described as a prequel and sequel to Just Kids, moving from Smith’s difficult childhood to the near present, where a startling twist brings the narrative back to its literal conception. It’s one of several revelations about an artist whose story now seems well etched into the tablets of rock history.

But surprises do not seem crucial to a work that builds its world through narrative voice as much as it is its description of events. This sound may take some getting used to. Smith’s literary mind, oddly formal, even old-fashioned, and at times unrestrained if not undisciplined, is an untamed horse. It can sometimes feel repetitive or self-indulgent. But once you settle in, it casts a powerful spell, and you will learn as much about the artist from her style as from the stories themselves.

The book begins with a Proustian evocation, oscillating between the present and the distant past, as Smith acknowledges her outward desire to “hide a miniature Quasimodo trapped inside the body of a grotesque child,” and introduces a recurring metaphor, her “rebellious hump”—a kind of sacred flaw that she accepts, harnesses, and rides.

Like many of us, she romanticizes her childhood; After 70 pages, it’s still only 10 years old. She adores her father, a World War II vet who takes factory jobs to support his young family, moving them from a Philadelphia home to semi-condemned government housing. They moved 12 times before settling in a modest new development in rural South Jersey.

Smith was a sickly child. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was sent to Chattanooga to quarantine and recuperate with her relatives. In response to her metaphysical inquiries, they enrolled her in a Presbyterian Sunday school. She longed for creativity; She remembers her “stretched fingers trying to reach the ivory keys” of her grandmother’s “glowing spinnet,” meticulously journaling. She would disappear into daydreams – in one story, she was cornered by a turtle on her way to school and wasted the morning absent-mindedly communicating with her. She found similar refuge in vividly imagined playtime with her sister, Linda, 11 months younger, and little brother, Todd. “While our parents faced an uncertain fate, we practiced forgetfulness,” she wrote among many lyrical lines. “The future was a worry for adults.”

There’s a lot of wandering through woods and squares, waiting for fate to descend. It is, and you see the rebellious artist being born in the pause mode. Smith refuses to salute the American flag at school, in accordance with Jehovah’s Witness teachings given to her by her mother. On her first trip to an art museum, Picasso and Modigliani lit up her imagination. The same goes for films (Lost Horizon), music (Cheryl’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Bob Dylan’s The Other Side), and literature (Wilde, The Selfish Giant, Rimbaud’s Illuminations). When art and religion inevitably conflict, she chooses sides. “I had been told that there was no place for art in Christ’s kingdom,” she wrote of a conversation with a church elder, “and she advised me to think about what I really believed. But I knew what I believed.”

The turning point comes when 19-year-old Smith announces she is pregnant, and in solidarity, her brother confesses his gender nonconformity. Smith puts her baby up for adoption, heads to New York City, and begins the life chronicled in the book Just Kids. Those years, and her deepening relationship with soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe, pass in a blur here, as the book’s pace shifts from jog to jog. Her romantic relationship with Sam Shepard. Her first appearance was at St. Mark’s Church with guitarist Lenny Kaye. Establishment of the CBGB touchstone. We learn that Dylan invited her to join the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue, then cut her from the lineup on opening night. She hints at a love triangle between her, actress Maria Schneider, and billionaire Paul Getty. She recounts her initial knack for shooting herself in the foot commercially (refusing to change the lyrics to “Pissing in a River” for radio, or lip-synching “Because the Night” on American Bandstand). A final show attended by 80,000 Italian fans, and a pre-retirement counseling session with William S. Burroughs, marked her exit from the public eye in 1979.

The pace slows when Smith heads to Michigan with MC5 guitarist Fred Smith. They live a bohemian romance: they make their home in an abandoned hotel, renovate an old boat, travel to far-flung artistic landmarks, and the money is clearly plentiful, if not outrageously plentiful. They marry in the presence of their parents only. They have children. She washes clothes and writes. The narrative is radiant and intimate, yet cautious. “The trials and challenges that Fred and I endured were ours,” she wrote tersely in a poignant paragraph, referring to her husband’s health, his drug history, and whatever marital problems they had endured, declaring that “his decline was the tragedy of my life.” The transcendent sequence that follows—like those moments in her songs when the poetic spell takes flight—presents her strange writing style not as a superpower but as a superpower.

Fred Smith’s death from heart failure in 1994 was followed by a series of other losses, deaths that led to a creative rebirth. Michael Stipe coldly calls her out (“He admitted he was a bit drunk”), beginning a long friendship. Allen Ginsberg urges her to return to the stage. Old comrade Tom Verlaine joins her band for a comeback tour. Dylan invites her to open some shows and sing a wonderful duet called Dark Eyes. She captures that moment with her childhood hero indelibly: “I was rather nervous when Bob called me on stage. I started the verse, and we sang the chorus together on the same microphone, our faces almost touching. I could see little beads of sweat on his brow and sense the intensity of the sweat in his eyes. I grabbed my dress and looked at my bare feet, and in that moment I was just a widow, and the rambunctious young poet who had dominated my teenage senses was just a man.”

There are new albums, endless tours, books, awards, and double the activity. As the story unfolds in a laundry list of elegant memoirs, she and her sister, Linda, discover something about their lineage that stops time, reorganizing the wonderful fabric of life. It’s a beautiful moment of storytelling. However, her DNA does not change what the book has already shown, which is that the Patti Smith we know gave birth to herself. She sang herself into existence. She wrote – and continues to write – her own story.