PATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist.
She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging
of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including
Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums
of all time by Rolling Stone.
Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in
1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since
1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book
Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea,
and Auguries of Innocence.
In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of
Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an
artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Smith married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980.
They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in
New York City.
“Incantatory . . . Unlike her first memoir, the now
classic, Just Kids, which was all about the thrill of
‘becoming,’ M Train is mostly about the challenge of enduring
erosion and discovering new passions (like detective fiction and a
tumbledown cottage in Rockaway Beach, Queens). Smith, of course, is
a ‘kid’ no longer. She’s suffered a lot of losses, including the
deaths of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her partner in crime
in the Just Kids years, and her husband, musician Fred
‘Sonic’ Smith, who died suddenly in his 40s. ‘They are all stories
now,’ says Smith, thinking of these and other deaths . . . Both of
Smith's memoirs tell a haunting story about being sheltered and
fed, in all senses, by New York City.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR (Best
Books of 2015)
“Patti Smith’s new book remains one of the best reading
experiences I had this year . . . elliptical and fragmentary, weird
and beautiful, and, at its core, a reckoning with loss. Much has
been made of the book’s seeming spontaneity, its diaristic drift.
But as the echoes among its discrete episodes pile up, it starts to
resonate like a poem. At one point, Smith writes about W.G.
Sebald, and there are affinities with The Emigrants in
the way M Train circles around a tragedy, or
constellation of tragedies, pointing rather than naming. It is
formally a riskier book than the comparatively
straight-ahead Just Kids, but a worthy companion piece. And
that Smith is still taking on these big artistic dares in 2015
should inspire anyone who longs to make art. In this way, and
because it is partly a book about reading other books—how a life is
made of volumes—it seems like a fitting way to turn the page on one
year in reading, and to welcome in another.” —Garth Risk Hallberg,
The Millions
“Rich, inventive . . . Where Just Kids charted Smith’s path from
childhood to celebrity, M Train does not move in a simple arc from
one destination to another. It meanders between her interior life
and her life in the world, connecting dreams, reflections and
memories. Smith’s language lures the reader down this nonformulaic
path. She doesn’t slap a convenient label on emotions; she dissects
them. With each sip [of coffee], her ruminations deepen . . . M
Train is less about achieving success than surviving it. Smith has
outlived many of the companions who sustained her in her youth. She
grieves for her husband and her brother; she mourns the artists
with whom she had felt a connection when they were alive, including
Burroughs and Bowles. And in a scene that strikes a universal
chord, she mourns her mother . . . At the center of M Train is the
passage of time—the way places and events can mean different things
at different stages in a person’s life . . . Tender,
heartbreaking.” —M. G. Lord, The New York Times Book Review
“Incandescent . . . moving, lovely. Patti Smith is a poet with a
mindful of memories enough to fill M Train to the brim. Let’s be
clear: every observation is beautiful. M Train is chiefly
concerned with salvaging the pieces that, together, form a life
entire . . . In its barest sense, the book is a series of cups of
coffee around the world, drunk between waking and sleep. But once
the memoir has sunk in its claws, these rituals become a framework
for more meaningful observations. What is a life, if not a pattern
interrupted by occasional revelations or surprises? Where Just
Kids traced the linear progression of her friendship with
photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her coming of age in 1970s New
York City, M Train finds its footing in shared
experiences. It’s the universal—not rock ’n’ roll in
particular—that haunts the reader most . . . Aging and loss
transcend fame and geography. Smith whittles her prose down to the
essentials . . . M Train’s greatest reward, for a reader, is
her unwillingness to bend to the dream-cowboy’s recurring doubts
[about] ‘writing about nothing.’ Even nothing has meaning—the found
objects, the things remembered, the cups of coffee that mark our
days better than clocks. Would that every tribute to a life lived
sang so beautifully.” —Linnie Greene, The Rumpus
“It’s easy to see why so many readers say that M Train changed
[their] lives. It’s every bit the book Just Kids is, full of the
same lovely writing, resolute faith in the consolations of art, odd
flashes of humor, rawness to memory and experience. It’s obvious
why readers find a deep, deep correspondence to their own inner
lives in her work . . . The deeper memories in M Train tacitly
trace the origins of a new phase of [Smith’s] life, including the
loss of her parents and, most crucially, of her husband. She
conveys with tender restraint what it has meant to lose him, how
linked their spirits were. Moments [of] remarkable power blend
directness, melancholy, and memory. Smith’s searching voice speaks
for a generation that has realized later than most that it, too,
would age. ‘I want to hear my mother’s voice,’ she writes. ‘I want
to see my children as children.’ But only the artist is innocent
enough, or brave enough, to try and live a second time.” —Charles
Finch, Chicago Tribune
“Intimate and elegantly crafted . . . As a child, a woman and an
acclaimed artist, Smith has long reflected on the power of
invention and how it shapes a life. Her writing moves effortlessly
between past and present, both Smith’s and that of the scholars and
makers who have inspired her and with whom she feels a kinship—the
Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa, the poet Rimbaud, or Alfred
Wegener, the first scientist to present the idea of continental
drift. As Smith slips in and out of reverie, the effect is one of a
motionless travel; throughout her journeys, real and imagined, she
considers what it means to endure the hardships fed to us by time .
. . For Smith, this means following her wild and associative mind,
a sort of thinking that seams the unremarkable with the sublime. At
the heart of M Train is the careful braid the author
makes between everyday matters and her lyrical take on how art
offers a form of sustenance . . . To Smith, the constellation of
human experience is as valued in Jane Eyre as it is in Law &
Order—at times, we are dreaming about the high plains even as we
clean up after the cats, and try to figure out where we left our
wallet. Her photographs appear throughout the book like ghosts, dim
and unadorned, a way of seeing how Smith’s imagination elevates the
humble objects she cherishes. A silver thread also works its way
through her stories—her memories of her late husband, the guitarist
Fred Sonic Smith, whose wisdom she grieves for and celebrates. The
book’s final essays are a testimony to his words because they dwell
deeply on how the mind’s fires can light a way toward hope.” —Emma
Trelles, Miami Herald
“What makes riding the M Train so rewarding is the way solemn,
eloquent meditations on Genet and Kahlo, William Burroughs and
Sylvia Plath are offset by Patti Smith moments—like an imaginary
dialogue with Nikola Tesla, ‘the patron saint of alternating
currents.’”—Stuart Mitchner, Princeton Town Topics
“M Train comes near to accomplishing Marcel Proust’s goal to follow
the workings of the human mind and the human heart. By the end of
the book you know that nothing is everything, and that life is a
labor of love.” —Joan Juliet Buck, Harper’s Bazaar
“Intimate, delicately revealing . . . M
Train concentrates on a recent spell in Smith's life, one
where she spent days at a local café drinking coffee, writing, and
reflecting. Most of M Train revolves around the pleasure
of a local café—a public place to be private—and that sentiment is
at the heart of this book . . . Occasionally, Smith dips back into
her relationship with Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, remembering the moments
when the pair took advantage of everything Michigan had to offer,
from dive bars in Detroit to beaches on the upper edge of the lower
peninsula . . . Perhaps the biggest surprise of M
Train is Smith’s deep, personal connection with detective
shows.” —Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Vulture.com
“Evocative . . . M Train, works [like] ‘an interior hopscotch in
the mind, recording time backwards and forwards’ as Smith skips
from moment to moment across the past forty years of her life.
Reading the book feels rather like navigating a lucid dream . . .
Smith’s words are rhythmic, arranged according to ‘the music of
[her] imagination’ . . . The playful tone is endearing, and buoys
what is, above all, a meditation on loss—of people, yes, but also
of the objects to which she has become attached . . . Time shifts
in M Train: One moment Smith is in a café, the next she is
staring at [her husband] Fred as he crouches over a cornucopia of
her most loved lost things . . . Patti Smith loves nothing lightly,
and if she makes writing about [nothing] look easy, consider that
it’s not actually nothing she’s writing about—it’s everything.”
—Claire Lampen, Hyperallergic.com
“Satisfying . . . Cup after cup of coffee in cafes from Greenwich
Village to Tangiers is downed by the Godmother of Punk as this book
unfolds . . .There are many pleasures to be found here. This is a
book of quiet meditation wherein a CSI: Miami marathon can inspire
the same deep self-reflection as the work of the late Chilean
author Roberto Bolano. Smith stares into her black coffee and whole
worlds are opened up to her. M Train is her report back from those
journeys.” —Kristofer Collins, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“What does it mean to be a woman alone? This question lies at the
heart of M Train. That, and the eternal query, Where’s the
best place to get a good coffee? A caffeine-fueled travelogue of
first-person vignettes, M Train conjures ghosts. The
book’s touchstones are either cultural heroes (Jean Genet, Alfred
Wegener, Akira Kurosawa) whose graves she tracks down in search of
talismans, or they’re lost loved ones, specifically [her husband]
Fred and her brother Todd, both of whom died in 1994. Smith’s
muses are memories, or figures in dreams, or names in books . . . M
Train begins and ends in a dream state. The line between
waking and sleeping, remembering and doing, living and dying, is
porous for Smith . . . Discursive, fanciful, geeky, transgressive,
just plain and delightfully weird, it’s a book that loses you and
you get lost in, finding your own kernels of truth and resonance.”
—Evelyn McDonnell, Los Angeles Review of Books
**** “Powerful . . . Smith shares a rush of memories, reveries, and
revelations that reach a height with all the expressive power of
her most rapturous ’70s rock. M Train is a great
meditation on solitude, independence, age, a ride-along with the
last Romantic standing . . . It proceeds through cups of coffee at
tables for one, on planes and in hotels across Latin America,
Europe and Asia, animated by a mellowing grief for Smith’s
husband, who died in 1994. Yet Smith doesn’t mourn so much as
celebrate their love . . . Smith inventories her inspirations,
and makes her house out of the life lived, out of the love spent. M
Train will make this year’s best-of lists.” —Matt Damsker, USA
Today (four stars)
“Essential . . . A collection of lyrical, sometimes mystical
musings, with photographs. An account of a quixotic mission to
French Guiana appears among stories of a trip to photograph Frida
Kahlo’s bed, of buying a cottage on Rockaway Beach, of singing
Buddy Holly songs with chess master Bobby Fischer. Always, Smith
returns to her essentials: black coffee, a crime show on TV, a
pen.” —Marion Winik, Newsday
“Engaging . . . poetic and unconventional.” —Details
“After winning the National Book Award, Smith returns
with M Train, [which] pulls through 19 stations along
her latest stretch of track . . . Smith lets us into her
head in an extraordinarily intimate way. It’s a rare gift indeed .
. . M Train can be measured out in cups of black coffee,
slices of brown toast, and dreams. These are not the typical
elements of a page-turner, and yet, nearing the book’s conclusion,
I felt my fingers flipping faster and faster. Perhaps Smith’s
triumph here comes down to her ability to gradually reveal how the
mundane actually matters a great deal. It’s a read that ultimately
rewards and touches . . . Her sense of loss is so palpable that it
leaps from the page . . . The personal photographs of her and Fred
and her home after the hurricane were devastating . . . Even after
completing M Train, many readers may still wonder what exactly
they’ve just experienced, but I’d urge them to consider Smith’s
questions again. Are we familiar with her now, and are we glad for
it? Both questions deserve a resounding affirmation.” —Matt Melis
and Megan Ritt, Consequence of Sound
“A locomotive that runs on plenty of good, strong coffee and
abundant poetic reflection. The coffee—a real character in the
book, repeatedly and lovingly portrayed as a soothing companion—is
the map, not the road, however. M Train is in fact a loving paean
to the author’s late husband and, as these sparse but gorgeously
written pages attest, the love of her life . . . The narratives [of
M Train] are loosely connected, but attain coherence and continuity
through the grace of Smith’s prose, a language that can raise the
profane toward the sacred with only a few economic sentences. The
dialogue here is an interior one, as Smith speaks to few corporeal
beings, save the baristas who pour her java. . . Smith has a sense
of humor, and even her most ruminative thoughts indulge levity,
thereby avoiding heavy-handedness. But M Train is a prayer, to be
sure. This is Romanticism of the highest order, but Smith
avoids anything resembling maudlin. For her, life is no less
beautiful for the suffering endemic to its living. The irony and
snark-fueled aloof stance that form the defensive crust for many in
the modern age are not for her. Both would only diminish the wonder
of it all.” —Jeff Miers, Buffalo News
“A beautiful book. Smith’s prose has a crystalline precision . . .
M Train is, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot, a memoir measured
in coffee spoons. The effect of reading it is something like
sitting across a coffee shop table from Patti Smith as she stares
dreamily out at the street, pausing occasionally to tell you
something she’s just remembered about [her late husband] Fred, to
muse over the Haruki Murakami novel she’s reading, and to push one
of her Polaroids across to you. M Train is a book of tributes to
[her] masters; a meditation; a series of associative leaps that
interrupt the ordinariness of Smith’s days . . . There are moments
of breathless emotional force.” —Kelsey Ronan, St. Louis
Dispatch
“Wholly enchanting . . . bewitching. A most unusual and
breathtaking book: part memoir, part dreamscape, part elegy for the
departed and for time itself. Transcendent transience is what
beloved musician, artist, and poet Smith explores
in M Train . . . The point that each loss evokes all losses
[is] delivered with extraordinary elegance of prose and sincerity
of spirit. What emerges is a strange and wonderful consolation for
our inconsolable longing for permanency amid a universe driven by
perpetual change . . . The book is, above all, a reminder that love
and loss always hang in such a balance . . . This, indeed, is
the book’s greatest gift: The sublime assurance that although
everything we love—people, places, possessions—can and likely will
eventually be taken from us, the radiant vestiges those loves leave
in the soul are permanently ours.” —Maria Popova, Brain
Pickings
“Wonderful . . . M Train is about being lost and found. It weaves
poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into
a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole . . . Smith’s
journeys take her across decades, continents, and the vistas of her
own mind. She is a generous, charming, and brilliant guide. In her
loneliness, her cherished possessions take on talismanic
significance. . . She has no self-consciousness about the art she
loves, and the truths they afford her are honest and hard won. By
the end of the book, she has purchased a bungalow, drunk
innumerable cups of black coffee, and come to some resolutions
about her life, none of them easy or pat.” —Eugenia Williamson, The
Boston Globe
“In the span of M Train, Smith distills ineffable, tragic human
existence into a collection of experiences, meditating on the
intangible permanence of loss over a lifetime. Through freely
associated vignettes and artful snapshots of her life, the artist
creates an elegy for objects, people and muses she’s left behind.
Smith’s M Train demonstrates, once again, her ability to turn
a phrase or an image on its head. Whether she writes of a dream or
a lost coat, she connects threads of memory, pain and the absurdity
of human experience. Smith is as captivating narrating a meal
as she is illustrating the nature of masterpiece . . . M
Train floats languorously from past to present, from dream to
waking moment. Smith’s work embodies a constant yearning, and the
effect of her amalgamated experiences is a picture of life that
becomes about accepting loss. There’s a conceit carried through the
book about writing when there’s nothing to say; in Smith’s moments
of nothing, though, she says everything.” —Heather Scott
Partington, Las Vegas Weekly
“Charming and non-pretentious—full of genuine delight. Smith slips
beguilingly between present and past. Once a muse, now she muses.
Once an icon of alternative culture, she now loves to sit in
anonymity at her favorite Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Thanks to
M Train, we can see Smith clearly: a woman who doesn’t speak in our
era’s languages of snark, irony, and one-upmanship. While she’s a
veteran of punk rock, she doesn’t appear to have a reservoir of
anger or bitterness. She’s hardly forgotten the losses in her life.
But she moves forward, ever delighted to see what’s now and what’s
next: ‘We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts draw us away.’”
—Randy Dotinga, Christian Science Monitor
“Smith’s lyrical prose is potent . . . insightful. She clearly
knows herself. She is a survivor in every sense of the word. Her
grappling with loss pours out of the book. The title begs the
question: Where does the M Train go? Nowhere. And,
everywhere. Perhaps I naively believed that Patti Smith had all the
answers. She doesn’t. Like all of us, she harbors confusions, gets
grumpy without coffee, and holds fascinations with certain people
and things. She probes the peculiar depths of human listlessness.
It’s worth settling down with this book and a cup of joe.” —Paula
Mejia, Newsweek
“Packed with thoughtful prose and keen observations . . . The prose
of M Train floats. Patti Smith paints solitude as
beguiling and essential. M Train doesn’t glorify sadness or
loneliness, nor does it suggest that Smith walks this present-day
Earth through a tunnel of malaise. Rather, she travels around the
world, finding solace in specific cafes in every city. She keeps
her own company, and her sense of humor remains intact. Smith has
always been a poet first and foremost—before she was ever a
performer. Here, she has created a book that so many of us wish to
write, one that parses what it all means. Smith doesn’t sound like
she has it all figured out, but she does have stories that serve as
markers in her journey as an artist.” —Kathy Iandoli, Pitchfork
“This gorgeously written book—sprinkled with richly detailed
memoires of Fred Smith and often dreamlike in structure—is likely
to prove revelatory even to longtime fans.” —Brian McCollum,
Detroit Free Press
“ Thrilling . . . Like Patti Smith’s life, M Train feels
guided simultaneously by determination and serendipity . .
. Each chapter is set in motion by a Proustian moment that
provokes an unpredictable chain of memory and observation, one
thing talking to another. To the degree that we’re led to imagine
the life of the book’s author, that life feels familiar, even
ordinary, the life of a woman who was once a dreamy girl in New
Jersey. But simultaneously, the life feels exotic, extraordinary,
the life of a woman who has visited places and seen things that,
without her having written about them, we would never imagine . . .
S mith the writer is well-known as both a musician and a visual
artist, but writing has always lain at the center of her
achievement. But it’s one thing to write a great rock-and-roll
lyric and another thing to write a book like M Train . . . The
punk chanteuse has become the irresistible siren of middle age, and
she has done so not by surviving but by refusing to settle for the
glamour of past accomplishment. Except for what she will do
next, M Train is the most beautiful thing she’s ever
made.” —James Longenbach, The Nation
“A remarkably intimate look at Smith’s life in New York City.
Throughout she bounces between home and her favorite Greenwich
Village café, where she writes in her notebook and ponders the
past. Memories of her childhood, her extensive travels and her
marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith provide points of departure for the
narrative. At once poetic and direct, M Train reflects Smiths
inquisitive, exploratory spirit . . . Like her trademark
attire—boots, cap, coat—her narratives have a plainspoken beauty
that transcends the times. An American original and a magical
writer, Smith makes the reader believe in the redemptive power of
art.” —Julie Hale, BookPage
“Sublime—sparse and poetic . . . Patti Smith can make sitting alone
on her stoop on New Year’s Eve, watching the drunken revelers, seem
like the coolest thing in the world.” —Suzi Feay, Financial
Times
“Smith began her career writing poetry books and for rock magazines
(including this one). So it’s no surprise that the successor to
Just Kids is no boilerplate rock-star flash back. M Train is an
impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, and epiphanies, a
meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one . . .
Smith’s caffeinated flow has charm, and the beauty of her writing
breaks through . . . She is a generation’s great medium,
freestyling séances over diner coffee, across years of magical
thinking.” —Will Hermes, Rolling Stone
“Smith’s prose moves seamlessly from the literary to the cinematic,
from the musical (Mendelssohn, Puccini) to, perhaps most
surprisingly, the televisual. One of the many joys of
reading M Train is learning about Smith's obsession with
detective serials . . . That fascination ripples through M
Train, whose inclusion of Polaroids of everyday objects at times
feels like a series of endless clues that would no doubt help us
unlock Smith's own train of thought—were it not so much more
entertaining following it aimlessly instead. Every page feels like
an invitation to another world, another portal being opened,
another rabbit hole to be dug, to be followed, to be lost in . . .
Her sentences bring to life those authors and loved ones she’s lost
but carries within her.” —Manuel Betancourt, Slant Magazine
“The legendary singer-songwriter takes readers on a journey through
love, loss and a vanishing New York. M Train is as filled with
words [and] images: pictures she’s taken of talismans she’s
traveled the world to capture, or gathered from her life in New
York. Frida Kahlo’s crutches. Sylvia Plath’s headstone. Her
husband’s passport photo. It is a collection of memento
mori, of dreamlike remembrances of journeys to cemeteries and
penal colonies and the hurricane-devastated boardwalk of Rockaway
Beach, the end of a favorite crime show, a Haruki Murakami novel
accidentally abandoned.” —Rob Smith, Amtrak Arrive
“For those who read Just Kids and adored Smith’s
voracious appetite for art and praise of writers and poets, M
Train will not disappoint . . . Smith found her way to music
through poetry, and her prose reflects her history. Still, what is
most affecting in her writing is not just her use of words; she
describes being a human with such depth that you close the book
feeling as if you know her . . . She loved, mothered, and learned
so deeply that she transcended her famous self, and touched in with
something at the core of humanity. It is in her descriptions of the
everyday that the artist in her shows clearest . . . In writing,
she finds a family long after her husband and friends are gone, and
to our great fortune, she chose to share them with readers.” —Emily
Neuberger, Everyday eBook
“Writer, artist, and musician (to some, the High Priestess of
Punk), Patti Smith gifts the literary world and a whole new
generation of fans with another look into her singular mind,
piquant curiosities, and otherworldly experiences.” —Emily Barasch,
vogue.com
“A book of memory. Smith gives spirituality to coffee—this book is
an ode to it—a ‘post-Beat meditation’ on Smith’s ‘substance of
choice.’ The objects of M Train are full of life. As Smith ages, so
does the totemic power that surrounds her.” —Anna Heyward, T, The
New York Times Style Magazine
“Complex and enchanting . . . Smith’s writing is easy and direct;
her indomitable curiosity is obvious on every page. Certain words
flicker like mica. Sundry fleeting images of places she has
visited; montages of observations, with the deep references
of a collector or scholar; by turns warm, wary, cagey, detached,
and involved, each sentence leaves details to be considered
further. It’s energetic writing and compelling storytelling that
actually sound like the author enjoys relating. Patti makes
being wise and smart such appealing qualities . . . These views
into her life often seem so fantastical one could feel they are
reading fiction, if we didn’t know better, and if her moody
photographs throughout weren’t there for proof as well. Purely
fascinating and glorious to read.” —Peter Holsapple, The Daily
Beast
“Amazing. Marvelous—funny and tender and sad, simple, soulful and
rigorous . . . One of the things I love most about Patti Smith is
the way she makes you interested in other things. In M Train, she
takes you on a journey that includes Frida Kahlo, Bobby Fischer, TV
series The Killing and Sylvia Plath . . . She even manages to make
grief beautiful. The real thrill, though, is how funny she is.
Really hilarious, in a way that you just wouldn’t expect . . . One
of the other things that struck me is how pure Patti Smith’s life
is. She lives it at her own pace, with no entourage or staff or
hangers-on . . . Smith inspires hope and courage and
confidence—surely the things that matter most in life.” —Porter
“Potent . . . The M Train is a Magical Mystery line that Smith
rides, her snaking Mental trains of thought carrying her into
Memoryland, as well as into reveries on subjects as wide-ranging as
her passionate appetite for detective stories, and her surprising
membership in a scientific society devoted to the subject of
continental drift. Smith travels far afield geographically, too,
making pilgrimages to the homes and graves of beloved writers and
artists. Ultimately, it's the local stops on M Train that make the
most profound impressions . . . Smith’s suffered a lot of losses,
[and] M Train is about enduring [that] erosion. She has weathered
storms, but as she eloquently demonstrates in M Train there's a
spooky beauty in those ramshackle things, and people that defy
conventional wisdom—and keep on standing.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s
Fresh Air
“Spare and elliptical—part dream diary, part travelogue, and shot
through with sobering reflections on age and impermanence. Smith’s
passion is undiminished: for good books, strong coffee, a poem or
painting or a beautiful piece of music she can get lost in. She’ll
travel thousands of miles just to take a Polaroid. But she’s not a
culture snob; TV detectives enthrall her nearly as much as French
philosophers and Russian novelists. Fans of Just Kids will find
[here] a different kind of beauty: bittersweet and battered by time
and circumstance, but still somehow full of grace.” —Leah
Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“A memoir that blends a lifetime of memories with everyday
experience, M Train moves in several arcs at once, fading in
and out of dreams, jumping between subjects and years like a stone
skipped across a lake. It contains elements of manifesto,
passionate tributes to the writers she reveres, accounts of some of
Smith’s stranger travels and vivid passages of her continual search
for artistic inspiration. Memory and love weigh heavily on Smith’s
mind as she writes . . . M Train is filled with wonder—[it is]
a tribute to people and to sacred things, to Smith’s own artistic
calling, part of her effort to give permanence to what’s departed.
And so she brings those dreams, those lost loves, those sacred
objects into being. M Train is Smith’s treatise on life’s
purpose and meaning, and why a worn and tattered black jacket can
be cherished beyond all reason, can be treasured with the same
fervor as the world’s most celebrated art.” —Eric Swedlund,
Paste
“A beautifully composed account of travels and pilgrimages, told
through words and photographs—a touching and extraordinarily
well-crafted book that for all its formal architecture flows as
naturally as if Smith were singing one of her songs. Though the
book has been described as a travel memoir, that is a frame on
which to hang a multilayered meditation on loss, making art,
mortality and the sacred. A multimedia work, featuring her austere
photographs, it is also a musical book, with its own rhythm, color
and dynamics. Smith grounds the reader with a recurrent image of
herself at home base—drinking black coffee at her favorite
Greenwich Village café—then launches into quietly vivid
descriptions of various pilgrimages. Invariably, the real-time
trips melt into dreams, ruminations on art, childhood recollections
and reminiscences. Some of the book is taken up with plain great
yarns, like the time she wound up singing Buddy Holly songs with
Bobby Fischer. Indeed, Smith appears to take a disarming pleasure
in exposing her own vulnerability . . . She weaves these
threads—loss, coffee, death, a beach cafe, dreams, pilgrimages,
memory, childhood, [a] cowpoke—like the musical themes of a softly
unfolding fugue, eventually coming to rest in a dream, one
prefigured in an early passage of the book. Nicely done.” —Paul de
Barros, The Seattle Times
“Patti Smith writes exquisitely. She is a survivor whose dreams
prod her to ‘redeem the lost’ by writing about them. M Train evokes
people who died far too young, including—most devastatingly—her
husband, and her brother, who died exactly one month later . . .
Unlike the relatively straightforward, chronological narrative of
Just Kids, M Train drifts fluidly between a fugue state
of memories, dreams, and a largely solitary present. But it is also
energized by her keen interests and obsessions. These include her
passion for coffee and her beloved neighborhood cafés, where she
writes on scraps of napkins; a rundown property she buys near the
beach in Far Rockaway, just weeks before Hurricane Sandy;
television detective mysteries, which she binge-watches; and Haruki
Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle . . . Elegiac,
melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and
haunting Polaroid snapshots.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Deeply personal, lovely, vivid . . . In 1994, Smith lost her
husband to heart failure, and her brother to stroke. Those losses,
and newer, fresher sorrows, pierce her elegiac M Train, which in
its own elliptical way is as much a love story about her late
husband as Just Kids, her stunning memoir of youth and bohemia, was
about Robert Mapplethorpe . . . [Her] peripatetic life is
chronicled in M Train, a series of journeys through cities, hotels,
dreams and memories. The M stands for mind, and Smith is her
train’s conductor. As such, she has written a book that is
memoirish, but not strictly a memoir—a Proustian tour of love, loss
and survival, leavened with comedic digressions. Smith is clearly
game for anything, and chasing her obsessions, she winds up in
curious places . . . As a writer she must go it alone. And as a
writer still making peace with devastating loss, it is a given that
whatever she’s writing is haunted by ghosts. Books are her deepest
love, and writing them is clearly her keenest ambition.” —Penelope
Green, The New York Times
“A work whose charm has much to do with its lithe resistance to
contradictions of genre . . . M Train comes in the form of
fragments of waking fantasy, literary commentaries, reminiscences,
evocations of lost objects, travel notations. By turns it is
daybook, dreambook, commonplace book. Under all lies grief. M Train
represents a sort of negotiation (through rites of pilgrimage,
writing, art, and divination by tarot card) with the implacable
forces of the world. Its unapologetic informality [is] a bit like
the title of the old Bill Evans album, Conversations with
Myself—the quality of laying out the contents of one’s mind to see
what they look like. Writing about nothing is after all one of the
most ancient and gratifying of literary practices, often so much
more rewarding than more formal chronicles and autobiographies, and
for that reason something that always feels a bit
illicit.”—Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books
“Patti Smith loves coffee. It courses through M Train like a dark,
steaming river, connecting her various adventures . . . She
writes—and, judging by her memoirs, acts—as if the world were
brimful with the divine. There are no fixed boundaries: her dreams
seep through her waking hours, she journeys on a whim. She is a
person for whom the material world veils—flimsily—a set of more
lasting, luminous truths. These are the truths of art, genius,
fate. She is an unreconstructed Romantic, which makes reading her
rather like time travel. M Train might start somewhere like the
present day, but soon Smith is transported across years and
continents, and off we go with her, like neophytes accompanying a
seasoned pilgrim. When it comes to popular music, our collective
memory tends to be short, but Smith resists that kind of
temporality: her mind is with the immortals. Toward the end [of the
book] she expresses something close to a creed: ‘Life is at the
bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse,
dwelling in the center, informs all.’ Her theology [is] served with
uncommon resolve. If you happen to spot her in the West Village,
buy her a coffee—or instead, pour a cup out for her, in the manner
of a true libation.” —Anwen Crawford, newyorker.com, “Cultural
Comment”
“Patti Smith is a great artist, but she might be a greater fan of
art, in all its many forms. While her bestselling Just
Kids was a largely straightforward memoir of her youth in New
York, M Train is a simulation of what it is like to live
inside her brain . . . What ties together the things she loves
is their romance, their intensity, their dignity. There is a hint
of poetry in each of them. By naming such a vast network of
influences, she is giving dreamy, young readers a roadmap to
her haute bohemian life, with coffee and travel and dreams . . . I
want to vacation in Patti Smith’s mind. Because M
Train isn’t just a roadmap; it’s an archive, too. It’s Smith,
often alone and haunted by so many intimate ghosts, preparing
herself for precisely the thing we make art to confront—and defy:
mortality . . . M Train is a monument to the timeless
creations of humans doomed to die. It’s hard to imagine how
anyone in our long history can have loved them as much as
she does.” —Judy Berman, Flavorwire
“Sublime. Smith, poet and shaman, [is] an American icon, a vagabond
child of rock ’n’ roll who fused it with her own, fiercely honest
poetry . . . When Just Kids, her rapturous labor of
love, was received with acclaim (and a National Book Award), some
were surprised. The Mother Courage of Punk can write! Her new
memoir, M Train, will leave no one in doubt that she has long
since been a member of what she calls that secret society of
writerly bums and obsessed alchemists panning for a drop of
gold. M Train—the title signifies a ‘mind train’ that goes to
any station it wants—is a collection of true stories concerning
irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild
imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is.”
—John Heilpern, Vanity Fair
“Captivating . . . rich, varied. How to mourn for what’s lost
without allowing loss to take over? While leaving space for what’s
lost to return in an old or new form? These are the questions at
the heart of M Train, [which] takes us on a journey through the
‘stuff’ of Smith’s bookshelves and suitcases, as well as of her
mind and memory . . . M Train embraces the fragment—moments of
reverie [that] arise from the mundane. Integrated into the text are
Polaroid photographs [that are] in productive tension with the
text, as in the novels of W.G. Sebald, whose work Smith
greatly admires. While it is perhaps a cliché to call such a book
‘dream-like,’ M Train truly moves with the logic of dreams, and
Smith gives equal consideration to her dreams as she does to her
waking experience. But what makes M Train feel most like a dream is
its slippery, mystical relationship to time. Smith imbues it with
such a haze that she appears to board a plane to Berlin as
seamlessly as she walks to the corner deli. This loose relationship
to time allows [her] to appreciate aspects of the contemporary
world through an anachronistic lens; it’s as if Smith is enamored
with the present moment insomuch as it allows her access to the
past . . . Smith is all too aware that much of what gets lost is
irreplaceable: ‘Please stay forever, I say to the things I know.
Don’t go. Don’t grow.’ The journey of M Train through Smith’s
‘stuff,’ we come to understand, is itself an incantation of this
plea.” —Sara Jaffe, San Francisco Chronicle
“Achingly beautiful . . . a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses
dealt out by time and chance and circumstance . . . Smith is
remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose
here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial. Like her famous
Polaroid photos (some of which are scattered throughout the book),
the chapters of M Train are magic lantern slides, jumping,
free-associatively, between the present and the past. Whereas Just
Kids centered on her early years in New York in the late 1960s and
’70s, this volume chronicles her peregrinations around the world
and into the recesses of her imagination; its unities are not of
time and place, but the landscape of Smith’s own mind. The
ghosts of artists haunt these pages, as do the spirits of her
beloved husband and brother. And a dark melody of loss threads its
way through this volume. Her favorite coat—lost. Her favorite
Murakami book—left in an airport bathroom. Her favorite camera—left
on a beach. Her favorite café—closed. Smith buys a tiny house near
Rockaway Beach, and while it somehow survives Hurricane Sandy, she
witnesses the myriad losses of her neighbors—the boardwalk turned
to splinters, hundreds of homes burned to the ground . . . If Just
Kids was about starting out as an artist and setting forth in the
world, M Train feels more like a look at the past through a
rearview mirror . . . An eloquent—and a deeply moving—elegy for
what she has ‘lost and cannot find’ but can remember in words.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Marvelous . . . M Train is a book of days, a year in the life, a
series of reflections; it concerns itself with reckoning. Its
episodes find Smith at home in Greenwich Village, on the road in
Japan or London or Mexico City, looking back and forth across the
days. M Train is a book about the process of its own creation, a
slice of life with skeleton exposed. Like memory, it flows in and
out of the present, as Smith goes on about the business of
existence—writing, performing, traveling, pondering. [She] has
always represented aspiration as much as achievement, the idea that
art ennobles us by bringing us in contact with some thread of
thought or feeling larger than ourselves. The message is that
living is a kind of invocation, or better yet, a form of prayer.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Profoundly strong . . . After reading M Train, it will be clear to
any reader that Smith’s formidable twin powers of rhetoric and
compassion cast the kind of spell that one must return to over and
over again . . . Each chapter treats an important loss in her life,
from her heartbreaking historical moments as the death of her
husband, to such private griefs as the sudden misplacement of her
favorite coat. She moves between reflections on actual events
through the use of dreamscapes; she crafts fluid transitions
between her event memory, her creative instincts to romantically
transform the real event, and her meditations on how to cope with
what she’s learned. The train is her metaphor for dreaminess, [and]
we glide into each station—some of them faraway sojourns—with her.
Smith sees soul in the smallest pebbles. She respects that
life is full of loose and lost ends . . . Smith’s [photographs]
serve both as a wonderfully tight anchor to the stories in the text
as well as a sort of unusual history museum unto themselves . . .
The real delight is how simply and daily she strives to embrace
those mundane realities with which we all struggle. In the constant
grip of what has been lost and mourned and pulled toward the abyss,
she just wants readers to be human with her, to be familiar to the
kind of compassion that ultimately bolsters an optimism needed for
making life livable.” —Megan Volpert, PopMatters
“Exquisite . . . a magical, mystical tour de force that begins in a
tiny Greenwich Village café and ends as a dream requiem,
encompassing an entire lost world . . . As perceptive and
beautifully written as its predecessor, Just Kids, Smith’s new
memoir is a record of a lifelong pilgrim, filled with mementos mori
and personal accounts of her travels, her artistic obsessions and
inspirations. Smith writes poignantly. Like her first memoir, this
one probes a deep emotional core. Don’t read M Train expecting
revelations of a rock star excess. It is a Proustian reverie [and
a] bibliophile’s trove, with striking insights into the books that
ignited Smith’s imagination. Mostly, Smith comes across as a
lover: of literature, of art and music, of her children and late
husband; of her parents and siblings, friends and mentors, many of
whom have died. There’s an elegiac tone to much of M Train, yet
there is extraordinary joy here, too. Her own journey continues,
illuminated by her openness to the world and her compassionate,
questing spirit . . . Readers who share in Smith’s transcendent
pilgrimage may find themselves reborn.” —Elizabeth Hand, The
Washington Post
“When the high priestess of punk-rock poetry won the National Book
Award for Just Kids, she set a new literary standard for celeb
autobiography. In [M Train], she explores a variety of loves
(coffee, TV crime dramas, travel, her husband) and losses (her
favorite café, her favorite coat, her favorite boardwalk, her
husband). Intellectually rigorous and generously layered with
cultural references, M Train is the closest thing Patti Smith fans
have to walking the world in her shoes.” —Emily Rems, Bust
“Smith’s National Book Award-winning Just Kids created a juggernaut
of interest in her life as a musician, performer and photographer.
Her new memoir takes a different tone and agenda—that of a wise
earth mother, literary shaman, and television crime-show junkie,
imparting the rituals, routines, loves, and losses that have guided
her long, productive artistic career. At the same table in tiny
Café ’Ino, she scribbles notes on napkins as she pores over the
books of beloved Beat poets, surrealists and select others [who]
have long inspired and sustained her . . . M Train’s nonlinear
narrative is beautifully in thrall to Smith’s restless imagination
and dream life . . . Pure Patti.” —Lisa Shea, ELLE
“Luminous . . . It’s pleasurable to accompany rock icon
Smith—mother, widow, artist—in her new memoir as she applies her
fine mind and humane wit to various pilgrimages and projects,
including coming to terms with aging and loss. Smith describes a
game she invented to fight insomnia and invite visions; it involves
uttering a stream of words beginning with the same letter. Let’s
play: The book is mesmerizing, mischievous, moral, meaningful,
mourning, merry, marvelous.” —Judith Stone, More
“Extraordinary . . . If Just Kids was Smith’s requiem to New York
City gone by, then M Train is her requiem for the moment. Through
vivid recollections of dreams and snapshots from her global
voyages, Smith weaves a complex narrative about surrendering to
Time. Her trips to various author’s graves (Sylvia Plath’s among
them), Hurricane Sandy’s destruction of her Rockaway Beach home,
and the untimely closing of her Greenwich Village haunt, highlight
the unbearable lightness of being that Smith so passionately seeks
through bottomless mugs of coffee . . . Written in between the
lines is the reminder that everyone can live a life worthy of a
memoir. All it takes is some romanticism, a little more awareness,
nostalgia, and heaps of caffeine.” —Hayden Manders, Nylon
“Exciting . . . Unvarnished and intimate, tender and frank—as a
musician, artist, and writer—Smith presents a singular self in M
Train [and] invites us to ride along with her over the course of a
year. As she ventures to the places the mind goes when one is
alone—dashing back to the past and then to the kitchen to feed the
cat—and travels the world to commune with artists long gone, we’re
reminded how lucky we are that she’s still here, and still
working.” —Marnie Hanel, W Magazine
“Unexpected and extraordinary . . . Enchanting and enchanted . . .
The book feels like a poetic letter directly from the brain of your
smartest, oddest, bravest friend, the one who has ventured so much
further than most of us dare to. Whether chronicling her obsessions
or her journey through grief, a survivor’s grace permeates this
heartbreaking memoir/meditation/artist’s notebook. M Train
loops and swirls through dreams, memories, images, journeys, and
acts of mourning. Like a modern Antigone, Smith attempts to honor
her many dead—her husband, Fred; Jean Genet; her brother; Frida
Kahlo; the writer Osamu Dazai; her parents. Her life in the present
is also riddled with losses. In her travels she loses photos,
books, a beloved coat, a camera . . . One wouldn’t necessarily know
from reading M Train that it was written by a rock icon; we see
little of Smith’s public life. Instead, she opens her extraordinary
heart and soul to us, holding nothing back and never permitting
vanity to intrude. It’s a gift, this record of beloved absences, to
which one can only respond: thank you.” —Stacey D’Erasmo, O, The
Oprah Magazine
“A collage of a singularly creative life. In M Train, Smith writes
about New York, her love of cafes, her favorite books and
television shows, her cats, [and] her memories, joyful and
melancholy, of her husband. But it is her travels—idiosyncratic,
ritualistic, vividly recalled—that provide a unifying theme. She
travels with purpose, with passion. Going backward and forward in
time, she describes trips to Mexico, France, Morocco, Japan and
other places, often looking for signs that will reveal her next
trip. As for the inconvenient aspects of travel—canceled flights,
lost luggage, jet lag—they are, in their own ways, opportunities.
After all, a late plane might be a sign to catch a flight to
another destination. And the ‘thick torpor’ of jet lag is often
‘coupled with a surprisingly internal luminosity.’” —Suzanne
MacNeille, The New York Times, “Armchair Traveler”
“The bestselling author[’s] second memoir dives into her literary
and everyday obsessions, and chronicles her travels, adding in
Polaroids she snapped of graves and artifacts connected to artists
who have inspired her.” —The Wall Street Journal, “What to Read
This Fall”
“Smith explores her life through visits to the places she loves: 18
‘stations,’ including Greenwich Village cafés, train stations,
Frida Kahlo’s abode, and her own bungalow on Far Rockaway. Smith,
who won the National Book Award for Just Kids, writes here about
the loss of her husband and her struggles as a writer.” —Laurie
Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune
* “Following Smith’s critically acclaimed Just Kids, M Train
creates a map of the singer-songwriter’s peripatetic journeys to
cafés, cemeteries, hotels, and train stations around the world. She
is the perfect guide, revealing the mysteries in the shadows, the
little bits of life people often take for granted—such as a good
cup of coffee, a familiar coat, or the ‘transformation of the
heart.’ Her haunting and joyful recollections of life with her late
husband, Fred Sonic Smith, anchor her intensely physical descent
into memory and its ability to haunt her waking and dreaming life.
The narrative carries readers through the despair, loss, hope,
consolation, and mysteries that Smith faces as she lives through
Fred’s death, struggles with the writer’s craft, and comes to
realize, through one of her dreams, that the ‘writer is a
conductor’—and she is indeed a phenomenal conductor along these
elegant tours of the haunting places in her life, where anyone
might stumble upon momentary but life-altering wisdom.” —Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
“Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith articulates the pensive
rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels. In a
Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in
journals, and ‘plotting my next move,’ the author reflects on the
places she’s visited, and the impact each played on her past and
present selves. She describes a chance meeting with guitarist Fred
Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage
and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of
travelling with Fred, armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid, to French
Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, and
to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary
Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach and
purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed
by Hurricane Sandy—though she vowed to rebuild. The author
synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art,
and life with Fred . . . No matter the distance life may take her,
Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simple
pleasures of a deli coffee on her stoop, her mind constantly buoyed
by humanity, art, and memory . . . An atmospheric, moody, and
bittersweet memoir, to be savored and pondered.” —Kirkus
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