Bread of Angels

A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids

"God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper," writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child's world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with tortoises and turns pennies into gold.

The most intimate of Smith's suite of memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us from her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and records such as Horses and Easter, "Dancing Barefoot" and "Because the Night."

Then she leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a mystical life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She creates a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith loses those around her, grief, loss, 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 fire and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.