Book review #60: Bread of Angels

Bread of Angels: A Memoir by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury, 2025)

By Steven Taylor

Their Christian parents believed / their deaths would get them out / There was Heaven and there was Purgatory / even Hell / any one of the three spelled OUT / ‘Sheer lunacy!’ these sons harped/ ‘If you wanna get somewhere you get there alive / dead you’re up shit’s creek!’

Gregory Corso, ‘The Leaky Lifeboat Boys’

DEATH IS A recurring theme in Patti Smith’s latest book, as are illness, travel, transcendence and navigating shit’s creek in the Beats’ leaky lifeboat. Upon finishing Bread of Angels, I recalled a long-ago conversation with Ed Sanders. We were talking about friends and family members who had suffered long illnesses, and I said, ‘What do you do if you get sick like that?’ His Kansas-City-inflected reply left me confused. I said, ‘Did you say ride it out or write it out?’ He repeated the ambiguous imperative. I decided it meant both. Patti Smith’s latest book is about her determination to write and ride things out.

Disclosure: I adore Patti Smith. The first time I heard her sing live, she did only one song and I was her backup guitarist. It was her first concert appearance in more than a decade. The second time was at Allen Ginsberg’s memorial event at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Patti wept into her clarinet and then read an excerpt of Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ while Philip Glass played the piano accompaniment that marked his first collaboration with Allen.

After the piece, she and her band exploded in driving, thunderous joy. It was thrilling. The next time I saw her play was at the Boulder Theater in Colorado where, after the band did the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, my wife Judy turned to me and said, ‘She’s better than Jagger.’ She’s the best. She’s the goddess of rock’n’roll.

Bread of Angels (2025) is her tenth work of non-fiction and her third memoir. Just Kids (2010), accounts her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, M Train (2015) centers on her withdrawing from public life to raise a family with MC5’s Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. The new book goes into her childhood in greater detail. (A third of the way into its 267 pages, we’re still in school.)

Smith’s developmental landmarks will resonate for many readers of my generation, but reading the book, the resonances came close to home: The hard working, struggling parents; the factory worker bibliophile father; learning to read early; making toys of broken things; fever hallucinations and the doctor called dangerously late due to no money; the series of poor rentals until Mom finally scrapes together the down payment for a small house in nowhere Zen New Jersey; scrub pine bogs and tick-ridden dogs, and pretending to smoke ‘punks’ in the cattail marshes; cheap day holidays in the cedar-stained lakes.

The teachers’college where I arrived five years after she left it for the city; meeting the Beats, poetry at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, egg creams at the Gem Spa, and CBGB’s grime-encrusted cavern. And now I see that in the 1950s, her childhood friend died in the hospital where my future sister-in-law recovered from a ruptured appendix. Small world.

Bread of Angels begins as an accounting of signposts and portents – her first memory, her first snippet of opera heard during a fever, old stories read aloud, and significant objects – the recurring motif of the white dress (see the cover photo). ‘I always believed in the magical properties of things,’ she writes, ‘before I had speech, I grasped for them.’ The opera is, of course, magical, as are the fairy and folk tales that comprise Smith’s earliest literary influences and whose affects echo in her prose.

Allen told me that Kerouac had a prodigious memory for conversations. He seemed to remember every word from talks many years gone. I was reminded of this while reading Smith’s detailed account of the events of a particular Sunday in her eighth year. How can she track all that? Because it’s a tale told a thousand times, part of a myth cycle in the brain, like Kerouac’s Legend of Duluoz.

To a greater degree than in previous books, Bread of Angels describes Smith’s process as a writer. Its episodes run from earliest memories and dreams and an ancient Irish neighbor reading her tales of the warrior poet Fionn mac Cumhail, to becoming a voracious reader with no inkling to write, and onward through the long chain of happenstance that pointed the way to poetry.

Bread of Angels is a story of ‘how I got here’ by a successful artist. A memoir of course is a made thing, a set of meanings arrived at long after the fact. And memory is, in any case, retrospective fiction. To present the experience of a seven-year-old as if she understood it at the time is the metier of the memoirist. ‘I felt like a child, yet also ancient, as if a human relic from a primordial culture’ is not a seven-year-old’s memory. This seven-year-old is inescapably seventy.

The memoir is backward bricolage. She’s very good at it, one of the most engaging of her generation. The story of becoming a writer is not just the books she remembers but the moments of insight and invention, loss and displacement, of a childhood among post-World-War instabilities. ‘In the first four years of my life, we relocated eleven times.’

Mother and daughters walked the railway tracks to gather coal scraps to heat the home. Her mother took in ironing to earn extra cash. They lived for several years in ostensibly transitional housing, perpetually expecting eviction. Her neighbors were fragments of families, Holocaust survivors, war veterans, and stateless persons. The neighborhood was slated for demolition.

On her seventh birthday, her mother established a tradition, the gift of a book. Over the decades these run from the Bobbsey Twins to Blake and Baudelaire. Smith calls them ‘handbooks of flight’. The friend who died and another who vanished spur fantasies. ‘Stephany gave me a story, an unconscious moral lesson, but in the end it was Klara who propelled me as a writer, even though I was not yet ready to write.’

Stephany’s had been a slow exit due to chronic illness, but after the shock of Klara’s sudden disappearance, Patti imagines the plain Bohemian girl with the long braids as a scientist, a detective, and an adventurer on the Amazon. ‘I never wrote these stories down; they live within the liminal threshold of my becoming.’

Sickness is a recurring theme. In a recent interview, when David Remnick asks why she never got into drugs, she says, ‘I was such a sickly kid. I had to be nursed through bronchial pneumonia at birth and tuberculosis and scarlet fever, and then the pandemic flu of 1958, and then mononucleosis, plus all the measles, mumps, chickenpox. Illness was an ongoing companion.’

During one particularly bad stretch of migraines and fever, her mother gave her a boxed-set recording of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Smith says gazing at its colorful cover pulled her through. In 1954, ‘the final eviction letter arrived. Everyone was leaving.’ The wind and lighting of a hurricane topple a tree through a neighbor’s roof, trapping an infant.

Her father and other men of the area lift a massive limb off the cot, a miracle. They leave the house on New Year’s Eve and she decides to leave her magical treasury of broken things in its place under the closet floorboards, an abandonment of childish things.

They vacated one condemned building for a six-month stay in another in Northeast Philly. More lost objects. A box of precious photographs and documents stored in a closet becomes a rats’ nest, its contents shredded. ‘My mother cried for days.’ The only surviving treasure is a newspaper photo of her father in his youth winning a race that she had preserved in a frame. I suspect she still has it.

Learning of a housing scheme for war veterans, Mom scrapes together the down payment for a modest house in South Jersey. The city girl is now in the country. God lives in the midnight bushes across the road at the edge of a Quaker family’s orchard.

After her maternal grandfather’s passing, her mother becomes a Jehovah’s Witness, but Patti is the more enthusiastic missionary of Apocalypse until, at 12, she trades the Witnesses’ New World for a vision of art. She had ‘labored to form an equation that would include all things.’

But after her father takes the family to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she is spellbound by Picasso, she asks a church elder about art and is told there is no place for it in God’s Kingdom. Her visits to Kingdom Hall ceased as she realized that ‘everything was a potential poem’.

The phrase ‘bread of angels’ conventionally refers to the eucharist, a taste of heaven. Smith says it is small acts of kindness, as when a rough boy from Philly named Butchy Magic extracts a wasp sting from her neck and a motherless local boy who shoots varmints for his supper ties a raccoon tail to her bicycle handlebars.

This first tentative boyfriend joins the list of lost ones when he is hauled away by his father in a truckful of everything. The imagined conversations they might have had join the through line of compensatory fantasies – the missed apology to the dying girl and foregone adventures with the braided one.

At 15 she is commuting to Philadelphia to model at the Academy of Fine Arts (in exchange for drawing lessons) when she finds, and steals, Rimbaud’s Illuminations at a bus station bookstall. She calls A Season in Hell ‘my furious guidebook’.

Her mother spots an album cover photo in the dollar bin at a drug store and figures Patti would like the boy’s looks. It’s Another Side of Bob Dylan. In their November interview, Smith told Remnick and his radio audience, ‘I had heard of him, and I’d listened to whatever I could hear [on the radio] – but I never had a record.

‘Just looking at him in that picture and reading his liner notes, and I associated him so much with Rimbaud. Even his face is very like the young Rimbaud, and he was alive. Finally, I had . . . somebody in real time that I could fantasize about or follow or learn from.’

Soon after I met Ginsberg, I asked him who was the greatest poet of all time. He didn’t hesitate: ‘Rimbaud.’ The romantic excesses of the teenaged symbolist have haunted many a young writer; those who do not recover fade away.

The brilliant cherub and flea-ridden vagabond appeared as the ideal rebel in the 1960s, as he was briefly in the days of the bourgeois banquet whose excesses have returned in waves ever since. He couldn’t sustain it, ran away to Africa to trade in coffee, ivory and guns (and perhaps slaves), and developed bone cancer, perhaps due to wearing his wealth in gold around his waist.

Most of the young Rimbaudians of my generation who made it through the 1970s got past the decadent phase. Patti Smith now owns Rimbaud’s childhood home in Charleville.

After three years at the teachers’ college, an encounter with a younger boy left her pregnant; a professor helped her find a family that wanted a child, and she left for the city.

When we get to New York, after a chapter on her relationship with Mapplethorpe (which is treated in much greater detail in Just Kids), we get the transition from poet to lyricist in the writing and rehearsal processes, and the collaborators, such as Tom Verlaine and Ivan Kral, who coached her in the craft.

From Sam Shepard she learns to improvise language in performance, and that it is impossible to make a mistake. ‘If you miss a beat, invent another,’ he says to her.

While touring her debut album Horses in 1976, she spots Fred Smith at a party in Detroit. ‘We looked at each other. It was like in movies where everything stops and everybody dissipates and it’s only a second, but it feels like it could be several minutes. I knew instinctively with all my being that that was the fella I was going to marry.’

The ‘how I became a writer’ narrative reaches a crucial phase when she leaves off touring and recording to move to Detroit with Fred Smith. Pregnant with her second child, the first one she will raise, she stays at home. She doesn’t drive, and when Fred is traveling or occupied elsewhere, she seldom ventures further than the shop at the end of her street.

Now she writes constantly in her beautiful hand, and the rock star phase begins to appear as a temporary distraction from her true calling. But it’s the hiatus that’s temporary.

The period as a punk pioneer might have appeared as a detour. Her 16 years away from the stage might have fostered that impression for a time, but it shouldn’t be definitive.

In his introduction to their New Yorker interview, David Remnick says, ‘Being a star wasn’t Patti Smith’s intention at all. She was a poet. She was publishing poems years before the record came out.

‘She’d written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was a kind of afterthought, as she tells it, an accompaniment to the words. Becoming one of the founding figures of punk was something that happened almost by accident.’

This strikes me as an oversimplification, understandable coming from the editor of a literary periodical, but music wasn’t an afterthought. In 1961, she writes, she and her sister decided ‘music was salvation’. That’s not a writer with a sideline as a rocker.

Rock is her religion, one to which she has returned while producing more than a dozen books. As Gregory told me, and likely Patti too: ‘Given a choice between two things, take both.’

Fred died of a heart condition in late ‘94. He was 46. Her younger brother Todd died of a stroke a month later, at 42. Remnick: ‘Did you think you could come back from all of that?’ ‘Well, I had to’, she replies. ‘A mother.’

Ginsberg encouraged her to return to performing. Dylan offered a tour. She reformed the band and has been working Corso’s ‘take both’ ever since.

As a child, she read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the Caterpillar asks Alice, ‘Who are you?’ and became haunted by the question. She says she couldn’t find her features in old family photos, and neighbors commented on her difference – a foreshadowing of her discovery, on her 70th birthday, that Grant Smith was not her biological father.

That discovery stalled the process of the present book for years. Altogether, it took a decade to complete. The final episode where she comes to terms with the revelation, and seemingly recovers a lost memory, is fluent, fast-paced, and thrilling, as when the band is in full spate. It gave me chills.

Editor’s note: Steven Taylor is a musician and writer based in New York City. He was a member of the Naropa faculty for many years and has been a Fug for four decades. Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, he was Allen Ginsberg’s guitar accompanist.

See also: ‘Smith’s Beat bond burnished’, July 10th, 2025; ‘Book review #8: Why Patti Smith Matters’, August 8th, 2022