Bread of Angels
“I have yet to meet anyone who has read Just Kids by Patti Smith, and NOT enjoyed it. So, it goes without saying, that Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels, barely made it through the door, before I had grabbed a copy for myself.
While Just Kids focuses on Patti Smith’s early adult life in New York (pre her artistic success), and on her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Bread of Angels casts a wider net starting with her childhood in Chicago through her work as a musician and poet, and her marriage, with concluding with the passing of her beloved husband Fred “Sonic” Smith.
Once again Patti Smith delivers with love and empathy, and in beautiful prose, the story, or rather stories, of her life, and of that of the people around her. Stories of hardship, of great art, of acceptance and determination, and of learning to live with the hand you have been dealt.
Bread of Angels is also a wonderful description of a time in American history, post World War II through the 60’s, the Vietnam War, the summer of love, and the AIDS epidemic that took the lives of so many of Smith’s friends.
What you are left with after turning the final page is a sense of great humanity, compassion, of devotion and adventure. Patti Smith is an extraordinarily empathetic writer, and it is her empathy and reflectiveness that carries her and the reader through the journey of her life.” - Isabella
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.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen.
As Smith suffers profound losses, 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 mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope.
