M Train - Patti Smith

From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.

PRAISE
“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 s