Memories of her years in Detroit, raising her first child with her now-deceased husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, blend with musings on Osamu Dazai, Roberto Bolaño, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Throughout M Train, which publisher Vintage is releasing in paperback this week, Smith’s physical journeys prompt musings that both dredge up the past and reflect on the present. We accompany her to Frida Khalo’s house in Mexico City, where she falls ill and convalesces in Diego Rivera’s bed to Japan, where she reads and thinks and eats to Berlin, where she attends a conference for an obscure environmental organization (and reads and thinks and eats) to Rockaway Beach, where she impulsively purchases a derelict shack just before Hurricane Sandy hits. We follow her as she makes her daily pilgrimage from her West Village apartment to the nearby Café Ino, where she drinks coffee, eats bread dipped in olive oil, reads and writes. Her musing on “the absurdity of interruption” gives way to thoughts of death thoughts of death lead to the lamentation of another kind of absurd interruption - the abrupt cancellation of a favorite TV series.Īs Flavorwire’s former editor in chief, Judy Berman, wrote when M Train was published, Smith “is a great artist, but she might be a greater fan of art.” The book is a guided tour through Smith’s art-addled mind. She turns back to her book, a collection of stories by the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, in which a writer is interrupted by a fan who wants to meet him. In the postscript, excerpted on The New Yorker‘s website, Smith is interrupted while reading in a café. Turns out when you’re Patti Smith, all it takes is a well-timed letter to the creator to land yourself a role on your favorite show. In a new postscript for M Train, Patti Smith’s wonderful 2015 memoir, the author, musician, and unabashed fangirl describes how she ended up making a cameo on a 2014 episode of The Killing.
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