Jeanette Walls\u2019 classic, \u201cThe Glass Castle,\u201d<\/a> Smith\u2019s saga begins with a hard-scrabble childhood she relates as if narrating a Dickensian fairy tale. In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements. Smith\u2019s mother was a waitress who also took in ironing. Her father was a factory worker, a World War II veteran scarred by his experience abroad. They shared their love of poetry, books and classical music with their daughter, who was reading Yeats by kindergarten.<\/p>\n ![\""Bread](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761906489_292_\")
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Smith, who was born in 1946, was often bed-ridden as a young girl, afflicted with tuberculosis and scarlet fever, along with all the usual childhood ailments. She writes: \u201cMine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence.\u201d When she contracted Asian flu, the virus paralyzed her with \u201ca vise cluster of migraines.\u201d She credits a boxed set of Puccini\u2019s \u201cMadame Butterfly\u201d recordings her mother bought with tip money for her return to health.<\/p>\n
As a 3-year-old, Smith recalls grilling her mother during evening prayers, posing metaphysical questions about Jesus and the soul, immersing herself in Bible study and later joining her mother as a Jehovah\u2019s Witness. She didn\u2019t confine herself to a single religious discipline, though. For example, while still a young child, she saw the movie \u201cLost Horizons\u201d and became entranced by Tibet and the teachings of Buddhism \u2014 \u201can awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.\u201d While \u201cthis seemed beautiful,\u201d she writes, \u201cit nonetheless troubled me.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a romantic quality even to the deprivations Smith chronicles, an effect heightened by what she chooses to highlight or withhold. With little money for toys, she and her siblings entertained themselves using the knobs on a dresser as instruments on a ship, sailing on faraway seas. She and her younger siblings regularly set out with their mother to the nearby railroad tracks, where they harvested leftover lumps of coal to fuel their pot-bellied stove \u2014 the apartment\u2019s sole source of heat. Under the floorboards of her closet, Smith conceals \u201cglittering refuse I had scavenged from trash bins, fragments of costume jewelry, rosary beads,\u201d along with a blue toothbrush she\u2019s invested with magical powers.<\/p>\n
Their apartment building overlooks a trash-strewn area dubbed \u201cthe Patch,\u201d which is bordered by \u201cthe Rat House.\u201d There, Smith proclaims herself general of the neighborhood\u2019s Buddy Gang, fearlessly fending off bullies twice her size, while at school, she was viewed as odd by her teachers, \u201clike something out of Hans Christian Andersen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within this urban setting, Smith often paused to marvel at nature. Taking a short cut on the long walk to school, she stumbles on a pond in a wooded area. A snapping turtle emerges and settles a few feet away. \u201cHe was massive,\u201d she recalls, \u201cwith ancient eyes, surely a king.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s impossible to know if Smith was really this self-possessed and ruminative as a child or if nostalgia has altered her perspective. What\u2019s undeniable, though, is that her extraordinary artist\u2019s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes. She recollects fishing Vogue magazines out of trash cans around age 6 and feeling \u201ca deep affinity\u201d with the images on their pages. She\u2019s immersed in Yeats and Irish folk tales while being bored at school reading \u201cFun With Dick and Jane.\u201d On her first visit to an art museum, viewing Picasso\u2019s work produces an epiphany: She was born to be an artist. A decade later, she boards a bus bound for New York City.<\/p>\n
At this point, about a third of the way into the book, we enter the vortex that is Patti Smith\u2019s talent and ambition on fire. The pace of the memoir accelerates. An alchemy infuses each chance encounter. Opportunities abound. Everywhere she turns there are talented photographers, poets, playwrights and musicians encouraging and supporting her. She writes poetry and finds a soulmate in Robert Mapplethorpe. She meets Sam Shepard, who features her poem in a play he\u2019s writing. She meets William Burroughs, performs a reading with Allen Ginsberg. She forms a musical partnership with Lenny Kaye, and begins performing her poetry, with the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as her spiritual inspiration.<\/p>\n
Smith\u2019s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale. Luck is with her, bolstered by a fierce conviction in her own bespoke vision. \u201cThere was no plan, no design,\u201d she writes of that time, \u201cjust an organic upheaval that took me from the written to the spoken word.\u201d Bob Dylan becomes a mentor. Her fame grows enormous with the 1975 release of \u201cHorses\u201d and the international touring that followed, yet she retains the bearing of an ascetic. She writes: \u201cWe hadn\u2019t made our record to garner fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith\u2019s rock star trajectory is diverted by her love affair with Fred Sonic Smith, for whom she ditches her career at its height, against the advice of many of those closest to her. But as with every decision she\u2019s ever made, she can\u2019t be dissuaded. In this intimate portion of the book, we receive glimpses of two passionate artists hibernating, in love. They marry, have two children, and cultivate an eccentric version of domestic bliss. But harsh reality intervenes and the losses begin to accumulate. One after the other, Smith loses the men she loves most \u2014 Robert, then Fred, then her beloved brother, Todd. These losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s final pages reveal Smith continuing to grieve, mourning the loss of other loved ones \u2014 her parents, Susan Sontag, Sam Shepard. I wish I could simply reprint those pages here \u2014 they moved me deeply. At 78, she reflects on the process of \u201cshedding\u201d \u2014 which she describes as one of life\u2019s most difficult tasks. \u201cWe plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel,\u201d she writes. \u201cAnd then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll must fall away,\u201d she concludes. \u201cThe precious bits of cloth folded away in a small trunk like an abandoned trousseau, the books of my life, the medals in their cases.\u201d What will she retain? \u201cBut I will keep my wedding ring,\u201d she writes, \u201cand my children\u2019s love.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah\u2019s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Bread of Angels By Patti Smith Random House: 288 pages, $30 If you buy books linked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7622,422,70286,146,31592,85,46,8971,1854,20550,70285,35378,70282,37256,70283,8075,762,70284],"class_list":["post-107696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-apartment","tag-book","tag-dickensian-fairy-tale","tag-entertainment","tag-fame","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-loss","tag-love","tag-mother","tag-new-memoir","tag-page","tag-patti-smith","tag-poetry","tag-rich-life","tag-school","tag-time","tag-young-child"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}