Three years after her last book, “Book Of Days,” and 15 years after her best selling, award winning biographical novel “Just Kids,” Patti Smith releases her newest book: “Bread Of Angels.” 

With over a million copies sold, “Just Kids” was proof to us all that Patti has the ability to enchant and inspire. I personally was completely hypnotized by the book. Her ability to capture the early 70s in New York, combined with an emotional story of artistic and sexual rebirth among herself and her peers, is tied together with dashes and hints of her own personal style and nuance.

Her writing style is new and synergetic.

Her talk of jewelry, folk music, messy hair, poetry, childhood memory, collages, photography, and late night diners was exactly my language, so it wasn’t hard for me to tear through “Just Kids.” I was left feeling refreshed, ready to take a new step in my life towards my interests.

With her release of “Bread of Angels,” she apparently offers the hope of a whole new mesmerizing reading experience.

Patti Smith has written about her late husband and love of her life, Fred Sonic Smith. She has written about her former partner and great friend, “the artist of her life,” Robert Mapplethorpe. She has written about her childhood experiences, who she looked up to in the world of the arts, and her personal journey through that world of the arts. This new book is now the sum of all of these parts, a more direct memoir detailing her experiences from her childhood, to her stage and recording life, to her love life and marriage. 

She comes from an ordinary American background, growing up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her father worked nights at a union factory and her mother worked as a waitress. Patti is no stranger to poor health conditions. 

Patti is no stranger to poor health conditions. Her father, who served in the military in New Guinea and the Phillipines, returned with consistent migraines as a result of previous experience with malaria. Patti herself spent a good portion of her childhood sick in bed from one illness or another.

This led to her accelerated reading skills at an early age, and with that, an accelerated imagination. She describes her feelings as a child having heavy emphasis on mysticism and themes of magic and the wondrous. She credits these details as playing a part on her artistic journey, along with her friends and lovers. 

Patti Smith is for the people, she grew up in a working class household, dealt with a multitude of health conditions as a child, and grappled with her relationship with organized religion. She is proof to the American youth that if you show up with passion, it doesn’t matter where or what you come from. She is motivation for the American youth to make art and continue on their path towards their passions. 

Patti is a person who focuses on detail and gratitude. She has an extreme appreciation for her relationships and her artistic process. In most of her work, she is nodding to and applauding her friends, lovers, and artistic comrades for teaching her something about her art, or leading her through certain doorways that turned to bright golden roads on her journey to success.

She learned from the presence of these people, the grief of their absence when they passed, and her artistic process throughout these experiences. “Bread of Angels” focuses on her relationship with the universal energies at play that have helped her and guided her through those golden pathways. A story of her gratitude for the bread of experience, gifted to her by the Angels that lead us where we are meant to go. 

Advisor’s note: If you put this on your gift list this year, try to buy local.