Patti Smith
Steven Sebring
A close-up of Patti Smith.
Patti Smith
Okay, she’s Patti Smith, so she can honestly do whatever she wants. This appearance in support of the paperback edition of her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, is a ticketed event that includes a copy of the book. No signings. No reception. No meet-and-greet. Smith will take the stage to perform what is billed as “an intimate evening of songs and stories.” Smith’s 2010 memoir, Just Kids, about the scene in NYC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, won the National Book Award; this one covers her childhood in New Jersey through her marriage to Fred Smith and, most revealingly, the “hiatus” years in Michigan, largely under the radar, raising her family. It’s honest and compelling work from the great punk/poet/prophet.
media release: A Room of One's Own Bookstore is thrilled to bring Patti Smith to Madison, in celebration of the paperback release of her newest memoir, Bread of Angels. Tickets will go on sale Saturday August 1st, at 10AM.
Join Patti Smith for an intimate evening of Songs & Stories. This is a book bundled event and every ticket will include a copy of the celebrated release.
This is a live, ticketed, event at The Orpheum Theater. There is no author signing at this event, all books will be unsigned. There is no VIP, nor any reception with the artist.
About the book
A radiant new memoir from 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 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.
