Punk Legend Patti Smith Has Enough Material for a Second Inspired Memoir with "M Train"
The first thing to know about Patti Smith’s latest book is that it isn’t “Just Kids.” The National Book Award-winning memoir about her early days in New York City and her relationship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe told a very specific story of her own coming of age that managed to resonate with seemingly everyone who read it, even if you were born long after she moved out of the Chelsea Hotel.
Her follow up, this week’s “M Train”, is a collage of memories, something she is calling “a roadmap to my life”: lyrical fragments about cafes, people, experiences. And it’s both wonderful and inspirational that at 68, this poet-rocker-artist-novelist still has so many experiences to mine, but also so many quiet, everyday moments to reveal to her fans.
There’s a story about Smith going with her husband, the late musician Fred Sonic Smith, to the French-Caribbean country Guiana includes visits to old prisons, cognac, and deserted hotels. The photographs include photos of Smith and her husband, both devastatingly young. “Looking back,” she writes. “Long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”
There is travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico and a strange tale of the meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society—of which she is a card-holding member—in Berlin. M Train has more everyday hidden revelations, too. There are several delightful mentions of her obsession with British and Scandinavian mysteries and watching “Law & Order Criminal Intent” in bed with her cats. (See, rock legends are just like us.)
Smith has always been, whether she likes it or not, a fashion icon for her no-frills androgynous style. There is a beautiful passage about her favorite coat, “an ill-fitting unlined Comme des Garçons overcoat” that a poet gave her off his back for her fifty-seventh birthday.
And then there is a small house in the Rockaways, a remote beachside New York City neighborhood near JFK airport. She falls in love with a dilapidated house she calls her Alamo. “I knew exactly what to do: one great room, one turning fan, skylights, a country sink, a desk, some books, a daybed, Mexican-tile floor, and a stove.” She manages to buy it, only to have it ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. Fortunately she was able to salvage the house and she uses it often as a creative refuge. The house, like Smith, is a survivor.
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