Just Kids

Do you know what it’s like to walk off the stage at the very height of it all for your greatest love—and then to face a loss after which you want to dissolve into nothing?

This is Patti Smith’s most confessional book: the journey from adolescent awe at Rimbaud and Dylan—to her first songs, and then to a quiet family life and the pain of bereavement.

Patti Smith has written several memoir books, and Angels’ Bread is the most intimate of them. The story begins with her childhood, and by adolescence Patti is already seriously choosing art as her guiding star. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan become her main conduits: she writes poetry and gradually comes to songs that would later appear on her first albums. But then she leaves the stage, marries Fred “Sonic” Smith— the love of her life—and it is then that she tries her hand at prose.

Together with Fred, she dreams of faraway countries and future roads. And then come heavy losses, profound inner trials, and the need to put her life back together from the ground up. In the final pages we see Smith again on the move—a wanderer who sets out on journeys so as not to lose herself; who lives so she can write, and writes so she can live.