‘Bread of Angels’ review: Patti Smith’s candid third memoir

Patti Smith has reaped many honors in her life. She’s been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, won a National Book Award and been granted France’s Légion d’honneur. She’s also earned the singular appellation, “Godmother of Punk.”

But perhaps Smith’s greatest honor is that she dwells in the pantheon of writers who have written essential New York memoirs. In 2010’s “Just Kids,” Smith tells a breathless “starting out” story — one about arriving at Port Authority in 1967 on a bus from New Jersey and, for a time, sleeping rough in parks and subways and meeting Robert Mapplethorpe, who would become her lover and soulmate as well as a famous photographer.

“Bread of Angels” is both a sequel and prequel to “Just Kids.” “M Train,” a memoir Smith published in 2015, is more digressive and ruminative, chiefly considering the consolations of art and travel in the wake of devastating personal losses. Her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the legendary Detroit band the MC5, died at 46 in 1994, and her brother Todd followed a month later.

If “Bread of Angels” lacks the strong coming-to-New York plot line of “Just Kids,” it feels more intimate than either of its predecessors, which are both graced and obscured by Smith’s enigmatic writing style. For instance, in “Bread of Angels,” Smith shares an update about the daughter she placed for adoption when she was 20; she also reveals a heretofore unknown mystery concerning her own paternity. And she addresses ever-present questions about her sexual identity: She recalls how, in recording “Gloria” for her landmark 1975 debut album, “Horses,” she chose to claim “the right to create, without apology, from a stance beyond gender or social definition.”

In keeping with this greater degree of openness, Smith revisits her childhood here in much greater depth than she did in her earlier memoirs. Born in Chicago in 1946, she grew up working class, one of four children. The family moved frequently, landing for a time at a subsidized housing complex outside Philadelphia nicknamed “The Patch,” which, she recalls, overlooked “a wide unkept field sprinkled with daisies and dandelions … directly behind us was a concrete area with overflowing trash bins, oil barrels, rusted cans, and discarded junk. Often, with no adults on patrol, we would assemble there searching for treasure.”

The most riveting life moment that Smith dramatizes in this memoir is her meeting Fred. On tour in 1976 for “Horses,” Smith and her band went to a welcome party in Detroit, lured, she writes, by “the legendary hot dogs.” After a while, they headed for the door: “That’s when I first saw him. He stood by a white radiator in a blue overcoat. I noticed the threads where a button was missing. That fleeting moment was to redirect the course of the whole of my life. … He placed the button in my hand, and I wordlessly declared it a treasure. I felt a gravitational force; my being truly shaken, kindling my desire for the One … I knew in that moment he was the one I would marry.”

What unfurls from that moment is Smith’s only near-chart-topping single, “Because the Night,” as well as a decision “to reclaim who I was” and step back from performing and into a life of writing, reflection and mundane chores in that Michigan house with Fred and their children.

“Bread of Angels” isn’t perfect. There’s a structural awkwardness about the way Smith has to leapfrog over those early New York years — the same ones that made “Just Kids” such a treasure — lest she repeat herself. Those of us who love Smith don’t do so because she or her art is perfect. It’s because of her aura of rough authenticity, her earnestness, her seer’s way with words and her occasional snarl. Fans also love her because of moments like when she stumbled over the words of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” when accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of Bob Dylan in 2016.

In that nightmare moment, Smith looked out at the bejeweled and tuxedoed crowd and said, “I apologize, I’m sorry, I’m so nervous.” As she did when first entering New York as a young woman, Smith trusted that if she just flung herself out onto the mercy of the crowd, it would buoy her up.

So it did. And does.