Yesterday, Patti Smith announced the sequel to her award-winning memoir about her friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Her second memoir, slated for release on October 6 via Knopf, will be titled M Train.
And yes, we got excited as everything these days seems to be about Bushwick as the epicenter of the universe but M Train doesn’t seem to touch upon our neighborhood and its undeniable wonders, which let’s be honest, is alright. The book’s description looks very promising despite the lack of Bushwick in it:
M Train is a journey through eighteen “stations.” It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself. M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings: a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant multiplatform artists at work today.
And who knows maybe there will be a little mention of Myrtle Broadway M train stop somewhere between Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul and Rimbaud’s grave… There is only one way to find out, and we cannot wait for M Train to come out in October 6.
