Alert, alert, Patti Smith – patron saint of creative drifters, big dreamers and anybody who’s wanted to go the road less travelled – is writing a follow-up memoir to her brilliant Just Kids.
The book, M Train, will touch on the important turning points of the singer and photographer’s life, and will include photos taken by Smith. M Train will be published in October this year.
While her National Book Award winning Just Kids focused on Smith’s relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and being young and creative and free in a New York City that young and creative and poor people could still in, M Train will see Smith ponder creativity and how her experiences of it have impacted her life. It also includes memories of her marriage to guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith who died in 1994.
It is, write the publishers of the book, Knopf, “loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir.”
Smith told Rolling Stone last year that she had started writing the book in 2011. She told the magazine,
“I wanted to write a contemporary book or just write whatever I felt like writing about, and it’s things going from literature to coffee to memories of Fred in Michigan,” she says. “It’s whatever I felt. I hopped on a train and kept going.”
The cover of the book, released to EW, shows Smith at the Cafe ‘Ino in Greenwich Village in New York where her memoir begins. Smith had coffee there every morning, and a photographer took this photo of her on the last day before the cafe closed. Smith says of the photo, that it was “the first and last picture at my corner table in Ino… My portal to where.”
