Parallel lives: a memoir that created memories
“The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.”
— Patti Smith
This is going to be fun. I enjoyed reading American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author and photographer Patti Smith’s new memoir “Bread of Angels: A Memoir” (Random House, 2025, 267 pages). Smith, who has fused rock music and poetry in her 12 recordings over the years and who is the author of 11 books, now at age 78, is still rockin’ and rollin’ and scribbling some mighty fine biographical prose.
As I made my way through the book, I kept finding similarities and synchronicities in our parallel lives. I’ve been listening to her albums and reading her books for my entire adult life, but it wasn’t until I started reading “Bread of Angels” that I learned the behind-the-scenes details of her life. And what a life it’s been!
Both of us were born in Chicago. Both of us had similar childhoods, moving many times to entirely new and different places in the eastern U.S. Neither of us were particularly fond of religion or our formal educations. Both of us were independent types and from the get-go were interested in literature and the arts. Both of us took to writing at an early age and were lovers of the same children’s books and eventually authors like Rimbaud, Whitman, William Blake and Baudelaire. Both of us were politically active and of the 1960s’’
Hip Generation and second-generation Beat poets and hung around our Beat mentors and idols such as Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs — she in New York, me in San Francisco. Both of us traveled globally and spent long periods of time in Paris and Europe. Both of us created major literary festivals and eventually formed poetry and music bands, making albums and CDs and going on the road, traveling in the U.S. and abroad. And both of us, now in our late 70s, are still getting “the word” out there as part of our hopefully helpful message to the world during a time of crisis and transition.
“Bread of Angels” hits the high points of her life — from her earliest memories up until the present day. Early on in the book, she talks about the effects of a book of Irish fairy tales and the idea of wisdom and the importance of poetry; the joy of roller skates as a means of urban transportation; the discovery of the books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens and L. Frank Baum and the photography in high-fashion magazines. The fictional character of Peter Pan — who was an inspiration and an aspiration for us both — and about whom she says, “I never wanted to grow up. I wished I could just whisk my siblings away to my own version of Neverland, away from all ties to the grown-up world.”
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As time passed, Patti Smith saw herself as different than most other people and didn’t relate to linear time. Through her reading she developed an interest in seeing the world — Japan, France, the pyramids, the Taj Mahal are places she mentions. She developed a love of nature and the natural world. “I wanted to know about everything — about other worlds and invisible forces,” she writes. As she grew into her later teenaged years, she was fascinated by the work of aritsts like Dali and Picasso. She was also fascinated by the story of the Dalai Lama in Tibet; finally arriving to the point where she writes, “I had chosen my own path, gave my evolving self to art, and decided to prepare myself for the life of an artist, pledging to be steadfast no matter the consequences.”
It was also at this time that she came to believe that “music was our salvation, expressing the inexpressible. We are a part of its evolution.” And so, at 17, it was a seamless transition from Rimbaud to Bob Dylan. In the years to come she would become friends with Dylan and become — as we both did at the time — part of the Greenwich Village scene around the intersection of Bleeker and MacDougal streets in New York City and all that place had to offer during the 1960s and 1970s and where and when her music career took off, which led to the formation of her band and eventually to the creation of her first album Horses, and the rest, as they say, is ‘history.’
After several years of making music and touring with her band, she married and settled down with Fred “Sonic” Smith (no relation), who was a member of the hard rock band from Detroit the MC5, a band that I saw back in the late 1960s at the Fillmore East in New York City. Together they had two children and lived a fairly bohemian family life in the Midwest. But Fred died early at age 46, and so Patti had to go back to making music and going on the road to make a living and support her children.
During this time she was also making royalties by writing books such as “A Book of Days,” “M Train” and “Just Kids,” becoming a bestselling author of books of poetry and prose with major New York publishers as well as being a popular and bestselling recording artist with major record labels. Inspired by her recordings and those of John Trudell, I went on with my band, The Boatrockers, to make cassettes and CDs and to publish my poetry with middle-range and small press publishers. I saw her perform several times over the years and we actually met one night on the streets of Asheville and talked about doing a major festival-type event with other music and literary icons in the near future. We continued a correspondence in this vein, with the actual festival event unfortunately never coming to fruition.
And so we come to the end of this review. “Bread of Angels,” the book, goes on, with its pages full of Smith’s evocative photos and with an almost biblical ending in deep contemplation mode. She continues to perform, to write, and to inspire in real life, something that, even at this late stage in life, we are both trying to do.
(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of more than 30 books, including the memoir “Starting in San Francisco,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
