Patti Smith revisits child self in powerful new memoir

Julius Miller, Tribune News Service

It's a rare gray Saturday in Los Angeles; raindrops collect along a window overlooking a row of trees at Le Parc at Melrose. Light trickles its way into the hotel room, illuminating a brown coffee table. An unreleased novel from Swiss author Nelio Biedermann sits next to a cup of tea, and a wood cross string necklace lies on the floor. "The weather is challenging for singing because it's so humid, but it'll be fine," Patti Smith says, before reaching for the mug. Her gray hair, with strands of white, hides under a gray beanie. She braved the rain during a walk with her son about an hour earlier, and still sports a mildly damp blazer atop her black T-shirt. In signature Smith style, her light-wash jeans scrunch just above a pair of tan, heeled boots.

She's 78 now — 79 in December: "Next year I'll be 80, I guess I'm getting older," she says with a smile. In seven hours, she'll step out on stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall to perform "Horses" in full, 50 years after it was released. Hence, the humidity debacle. "The rain is good ... but fills your lungs with humidity," she continues. "Makes it harder to push your notes."

The anniversary tour coincides with another release, but a book rather than an album. "Bread of Angels" marks Smith's latest literary endeavor, chronicling her life in full. Naturally, the memoir is a companion to the 2010 National Book Award-winning "Just Kids." That book has developed into a modern classic of sorts for its intimate portrayal of Smith's early life as an artist. Particularly, her days spent at the Hotel Chelsea alongside photographer and lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she notes was her "most important early relationship."

"I will admit that I'm hoping people will look at these books in tandem," she says. "'Just Kids' is like the brother and this is the sister." In "Bread of Angels," she briefly mentions Mapplethorpe, but still etches out a heartfelt, poignant image of the man when referencing "Just Kids": "I continued my journeys with the manuscript in my small metal suitcase. Robert and I never traveled in life, but now we went everywhere together." This book focuses far more on Smith's struggles while growing up, as well as her relationship with late husband Fred Smith and their eventual departure from the public eye. "There's only maybe three lines about Fred in 'Just Kids,'" she says.

The lens on Patti and Fred is widened, even as she writes, "his decline was the tragedy of my life, and it profits no one to outline the private battles of a very private man."

"That was the most difficult part to write, because Fred was a private man and I feel like he is a private man," she says. "There's a million other things that I have for myself, but I wanted to share certain aspects of Fred — I wanted people to know him a little." As for how the memoir came about in a broader sense, Smith refers back to a "fully formed dream" she had a decade ago, in which a messenger came to her door bearing a book. "It was my book," she remembers. "It was white with a white ribbon, and it had four Irving Penn photographs of all my dresses — my child dress, the dress Robert gave me, the dress my brother bought me and my wedding dress — an old Victorian dress."

"The book was an autobiography and each section was centered around a dress. And when I woke up, I was still holding the book." She put it to the back of her mind for a while, despite thinking it was a sign, but it crept back up: "It kept haunting me that this was something I should do." Over time, she began to think of those whom she had lost in her life. Fred, Mapplethorpe, her friend Sam Shepard — the actor and playwright — and her brother, Todd Smith, were all gone.

"All stripped of the possibilities of forging work, adventure and life on Earth," she writes. She also felt compelled to honour those she had lost, especially at their young age. "I thought it would be a good thing to write about the people in my life who didn't live long enough to really tell their story or fully live their story," she says.

Part of the book's purpose was also to "set the record straight," having had to navigate so many "made-up stories" about her own life, especially when she and Fred withdrew from the public eye. "I don't like using a book to refute things or to say anything disparaging about another person," she clarifies. "A lot of cruel things were written about me and my husband ... people had their own speculation, none of which were true."

"After a while, one decides, are you going to let what others write become the told and retold story of your life or write it as it is? There's nothing in my book that's not true, or exaggerated or colored to make me look better." This is perhaps most evident when she speaks about her childhood. Smith grew up poor, moved 12 times before fourth grade and witnessed the deaths and abrupt disappearances of many friends. She reminiscences about her friend Klara, whom she'd grown close to and says "propelled me as a writer." Klara vanished one day, only leaving behind a botanical book with pages torn out. Just before Smith met Klara, her friend Stephanie had died of uremia at 12. At the same time, she was fighting ailments of her own. Smith had "successfully vanquished" tuberculosis, scarlet fever, mumps and chicken pox by the time she had reached fourth grade, when she was struck with a virus during the Asian flu pandemic that nearly took her life.

"When we are really young, we're a bit self-centered," she says. "The idea of really expressing gratitude — I mean, pure gratitude — sometimes we don't do it. It's not because we're bad, we're just caught in the moment." "It's an opportunity, even with a sentence, to thank certain people, because I'm not going to write another book like this." The discussion of her childhood is not all grim, however. Smith shares tales of receiving a copy of "Silver Pennies" by Blanche Jennings Thompson; a "sole family visit" to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she was moved by the work of Pablo Picasso; and stumbling upon "The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde, listed in Children's Digest as a fairy tale.

Her ability to recall such memories with precision and discuss the way she felt at the time is mesmerising. She writes that, as humans, we must often return to "our child self, weathering out obstacles in good faith." It's a relationship she maintains: "She's still here," she says of her younger self. "I think that's been a saving grace for me. That 10-year-old child had a fully-formed imagination and a fully-formed conscience," she continues. "We grow up in that I've accepted responsibility in my life ... but that doesn't mean that I've lost touch with some of our magical elements, the most prized being our imagination."