Patti Smith opens the final door of her life story

With “Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith has finally given readers the long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s “Just Kids.” Unlike “M Train” (2015) and “Year of the Monkey” (2019), both of which mixed memoir with surrealism, “Bread of Angels” is presented as the next chapter of her life following the death of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, in 1994, and Smith (Patti)’s return to performance, recording and public life.

But this is Patti Smith, so nothing will be conventional or usual, at least within the narrow scope of the definitions of those words. “Bread of Angels” does take readers to March 9, 1976, the night Smith met the love of her life, standing next to a radiator in a hot dog emporium in downtown Detroit. But it goes back further than that, and even further than the sketch of her childhood