Cafés are one of Smith’s greatest loves, from her first moments in New York in 1965, owing to a youthful romanticism bound up in Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats, and she lists favorites across the world: from Paris and Sydney to Uppsala and Tucson. She writes of feeling off-balance and lethargic, overcome by malaise, bound otherwise by the simple daily routines of her café, her black coffee and her brown toast. Here, she’s sectioned her work off in “stations” rather than chapters, the disjointed times and places also emphasizing the strongest connections in her life.Īt one level is the present for Smith, roughly a year and a half of a particularly difficult period. At 66 (now 68), memory and love weigh heavily on Smith’s mind as she writes. M Train contains elements of manifesto, passionate tributes to the writers she reveres, accounts of some of Smith’s stranger travels and vivid passages of her continual search for artistic inspiration. This more experimental memoir aligns with Smith’s balanced artistic halves, the poetry and the punk rock. M Train moves in several arcs at once, fading in and out of dreams, jumping between subjects and years like a stone skipped across a lake. While Smith’s 2010 National Book Award-winning Just Kids was a tender and intimate portrait of two artists coming into their own, this follow up eschews conventions. Unfolding from the hazy edges of a dream, Patti Smith’s M Train is a memoir that blends a lifetime of scattered memories with the small, comfortable routines of every day experience.
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