‘Bread of Angels’: Musician-poet Patti Smith’s intimate new memoir is a quest for her true self

Patti Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels , arrives on a significant date. On November 4, 1946, Smith’s artistic soulmate and first true love, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe , was born. Forty-eight years later, on the same day, her “king among men”, beloved husband and fellow musician, Fred “Sonic” Smith , died of a heart attack.

It seems entirely fitting that this most intimate, comprehensive book – a decade in the making – should be published on such a hallowed day, almost 50 years exactly since her debut album, Horses , was released.

“The hourglass overturns,” she writes in the opening pages, shattering the illusion of time. “Each grain a word that erupts into a thousand more, the first and last moments of every living thing.”

Like her poetry, Smith’s