Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Unabridged)
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Patti Smith’s voice—measured, melodic, and unmistakably her own—carries this memoir like a spell. Where Just Kids traced her arrival in the 1970s Lower East Side art scene and M Train explored her solitude following the deaths of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith and artistic soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe, here she reflects on the arc of an entire life. In vivid, poetic sketches, she moves from her impoverished postwar childhood to her teenage discovery of poetry, art, and rock ’n’ roll. For the first time, she writes in depth about her own music, from the raw voltage of Horses to the luminous transcendence of “Because the Night.” Later chapters dwell in the years of quiet domesticity in rural Michigan, where she found peace and creative renewal, before her gradual return to public life. Even in sorrowful moments, her writing glows with faith in imagination’s power to transmute pain into grace. Her narration conveys the same weathered authority, making Bread of Angels an elegiac but unsentimental testament to endurance, love, and the lifelong labor of creation.
