Not content with being a one-hit wonder in the autobiographical section of your local bookstore and the literary world at large, Patti Smith is set to release the sequel to the award-winning Just Kids.
Back in 2012 she revealed she’d started on the follow up to her first memoir – focusing on her relationship with photographer Robert Maplethorpe and and their life in NYC – and now it is finished and you can get your grubby mitts on it. Well, you can on October 6.
Working from the outside in, the cover of M Train shows Patti at Cafe ‘Ino in Greenwich Village – fittingly where the book kicks off – where she started her day every morning with a breakfast of black coffee and brown bread. Nutritious.
Featuring eighteen ‘stations’, M Train begins at the now-closed Cafe ‘Ino where a young Patti would “ruminate on the world as it is and the world as it was, and write in her notebook” before drifting between dreams and reality, past and present.
Per the publisher Knopf‘s description, M Train floats “across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.
Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir.”
Plus there will be a stack of black and white Polaroids dispersed through the pages, taken by Patti herself.
You in? We’re in.
Here’s what you have to look out for on the shelves:
