Bread of angels

Smith, Patti2025

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Summary

"God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper," Writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life. A post-World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child's world of the imagination. Smith, Captain of the her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter. She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred "Sonic" Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Here, she invents a room of her own, a low table, a Persian cup, inkwell and pen, entering a dawn to write. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family. A series of profound losses mark her life. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again - the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.