M Train: A Memoir

Patti Smith's story telling is a national treasure. Completely immersive into the otherwise solitary life of a writer, filled with emotional moments in the authors life and what it means to carry on. Beautifully written, I could read this over and over again.

Well, I always knew corruption ran deep, this was still an eye-opening book. Great read, illuminating in a sickening way.

"Jesus died, for somebody's sins, but not mine..." was my introduction to Patti Smith in 1977. Even as a googly-eyed college freshman, I knew she was an artist to be reckoned with. So from my "Horses" alpha to the "M Train" omega, it has been a wonderful journey. This is a ruminative book that is probably best experienced while engaging in two of Ms. Smith's favorite passions, drinking coffee and snuggling with cats. It is a reverential narrative about her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, and the various artists she has been touched by in her life, all of whom she seemingly pays homage to by making pilgrimages to their grave sites. As in most stories, the journey is more interesting than the destination, as she travels to Tokyo, Mexico City, Berlin, London, and Tangiers. More than anything, the freedom that comes with age allows her to indulge her whims, such as holing up in London hotels to marathon watch detective series, join the eccentric Continental Drift Society and buy a ramshackle sea front home at Rockaway Beach just before Hurricane Sandy. In between we get large doses of her human side - she seems to lose everything while traveling, and spends hours writing and musing at the now-closed Cafe 'Ino in the West Village. Her children are grown, and the love of her life as well as her friends and mentors are now dead. But she carries on, with a dignity and grace that is something to behold.

M TRAIN is a better book IMHO than her JUST KIDS, though the latter won a National Book Award. This book is a collage of memories and experiences narrated in non linear fashion, interwoven with with dream sequences. It's a book about solitude, grieving a lost loved one, courage, and recreating the self. I keep thinking about this book even though I finished two weeks ago. There is much humor in the book, too, in Smith's deadpan way; some of the situations she puts herself into or gets invited into are amusing or endearing, making me smile. Other situations, especially one or two memoirs about Fred Sonic Smith are very sad but Smith rises above the sadness. I am 61 years old and I learned something about life from this book. Thank you Patti.

I thought Just Kids was a very good book, but M Train is even more up my alley. Just Kids employed a more straight narrative, a story arc mostly about a specific relationship. Although there are certain threads that run throughout M Train, like her husband Fred Sonic Smith, the passage of time, musings on other artists, TV crime shows and, yes, coffee, it is more scattered and fragmented. You dip in and out of thoughts and experiences in a way I really like, mixing the everyday with ideas about art, memories and reflections on an assortment of things. It feels intimate and it's easy to relate to these writings. Great book that should work for both people familiar and unfamiliar with Patti Smith.

I almost stopped halfway through. A good friend encouraged me to continue. "It gets better," she said. I continued because of that and because I have loved and respected Patti Smith's music and poetry since I was in my mid-teens. I was a charter member of her fan club in the mid-'70s. I also feel it's my responsibility as a committed reader to finish a book that's been written with grit and authenticity. It got a little better, but I continued to feel like I didn't really know where she was or who she was talking about a lot of the time. There were a number of paragraphs I had to read over and over again to track where we were: the equivalent of talking to someone who's speaking almost inaudibly or with a thick, unusual accent. I felt like I was squinting my eyes and craning my neck to track her conversation. There's no doubt of her being a brilliant wordsmith and poet, and that she has shared her grief in a poetic and deep way. At the end of the story, I was disappointed that after all the poignant mentions about her husband Fred and after I, the reader, proving my interest and investment by hanging in there till the end of the book she doesn't share with us what happened. I felt let down. To assuage my disappointment, I googled Fred Smith and learned this (which helped me to have completion): "In 1976, firebrand rock poetess Patti Smith visited Detroit while touring behind her album Radio Ethiopia, and was introduced to Fred Sonic Smith at a party held at Lafayette Coney Island, one of the city's most celebrated hot dog stands. While Fred Smith was married at the time, he and Patti immediately hit it off, and before long a low-key romance blossomed between them. By 1978, Fredwas once again single, and he and Patti were free to go public with their relationship. In 1980, Fredand Patti were married; Sonic's Rendezvous Band had recently broken up, and after a calamitous European tour following the release of her album, Wave, Patti opted to retire from touring. The couple moved to St. Clair Shores, a suburb of Detroit, and quietly settled down to raise a son and a daughter away from the media spotlight and the rigors of a musician's life. Both Patti and Fred continued to write music together, and in 1986, Patti came out of retirement to record the album Dream of Life. Fred wrote much of the material in collaboration with Patti, played guitar on the album, and helped to produce the sessions. In a 1996 interview, Patti said, "Dream of Life was really more Fred's record -- it was all Fred's music, Fred's philosophy." Though it featured the anthemic "People Have the Power," a song that would become a highlight of Patti's live shows, Dream of Life failed to find an audience, despite strong reviews. Sadly, it would prove to be one of Fred's last major projects. In the late '80s, his health went into decline, and on November 9, 1994, Fred Sonic Smith died of heart failure in a Detroit hospital -- ironically, the same malady that took the life of MC5 vocalist Rob Tyner two years earlier." [http://www.allmusic.com/artist/fred-sonic-smith-mn0000176087] Ultimately, I felt that while Patti has shared deep, intrapsychic treasure with us, she isn't intimate or relational with us, her readers. There was depth, and there was great, though vague, beauty. A lot of literary name-dropping, and her deepest relationships in the story appear to be with the dead or with inanimate objects (a coat, stones, coffee). I'll be pondering this one for a while. All of that said, Patti Smith is a deep, unique artist in a soul-less age. For that, I am deeply grateful.

This is a surprisingly compelling book. I have followed Smith's music and writings since the 1970s, and had the great fortune to meet her at the 2010 Miami Book Fair. I'm still unsure as to why I find her so intriguing. This is an unpretentious and often rambling book, dwelling frequently on what could only be considered the mundane activities of everyday life. But Smith somehow draws the reader in. Her trips abroad, largely brought about by literary quests, provide interesting insights into what she finds worthy. Interspersed with these episodes, Smith reveals the loss she felt subsequent to her husband's death, and what can only be described as her philosophy of life. In addition to the more serious stuff, one finds that she lives with three cats, drinks a lot of coffee and devotes considerable time to just thinking and writing. Like her previous book "Just Kids," this book is required reading for Smith fans and those wanting to get to know her better.

I enjoyed Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids" so much that when I saw she had another book published this year I just had to read it, and I'm glad I did. This book is very different from her earlier memoir, not nearly as linear, for one thing, and not covering a particular period of time. M Train is written in a loose, free-flowing style like a meandering voice of poetry. She dips in and out of time, talking about her parents, her husband Fred whose death she still mourns, her children, and her various travels. Her photographs illustrate the book and they are mostly photos of objects that she loves because each one reminds her of someone--her father's chair, Frieda Kahlo's bed, the boardwalk at Rockaway. One of the narrative threads in her book is her purchase of a small cottage in Rockaway, which she bought just before hurricane Sandy struck and destroyed the boardwalk as well as many of the houses. The book is plotless, but gives a good sense of Smith and of the things that are important to her. People who share her interest in the natural world around us and the artists and writers she knew, will enjoy spending this time with Smith.