Patti Smith To Release Second Memoir, M Train

Photo: Courtesy of Knopf.

National Award-winning author, artist, and poet, Patti Smith will release her second memoir, M Train, due out October 6.

The book will take readers on a journey, or what she calls “a roadmap to my life,” according to Entertainment Weekly. Stopping at 18 different “stations” throughout the book, readers will dive deep into Smith’s artistic mind as well and her trials and tribulations.

Different “stations” in the memoir will include her time in Mexico at Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, an Arctic Explorer’s Society meeting in Berlin, “to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.” (See The Striking Absence in Detroit Institute of Arts’s Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Blockbuster.)

The book comes several years after the release of her first memoir, the critically-acclaimed Just Kids (HarperCollins 2010), which recounted her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe (see Robert Mapplethorpe Takes Over Paris. Are the French Ready?). Similarly, M Train, will touch on her relationship and the loss of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of rock band MC5.

The image of the book’s cover was released today, and it depicts a younger Ms. Smith sitting at her usual spot at Ino Cafe & Wine Bar in Greenwich Village the day before its close.

Last year, Smith participated in “Rockaway!”, a series of installations scattered throughout the beachfront area of Fort Tilden in Queens to celebrate the resilience of the Rockaway Beach community in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (see Patti Smith’s Resilience of the Dreamer Celebrates the Rockaways).


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