Under heavy manna
Enduring singer and writer recalls her life and losses in grief-scarred memoir.
By Victoria Segal.
Book of remembrance: Patti Smith in 1995, transfiguring the beauty and brutality of existence.
Keith Beaty/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Bread Of Angels
★★★★
Patti Smith
BLOOMSBURY. £25
ONE EVENING IN 1954, eight-year-old Patti Smith and her three siblings begged their mother to show them the family photographs kept in a box in the bedroom. Having just moved from one condemned Philadelphia tenement to another, most of their possessions were in storage, but the pictures were too valuable to leave unguarded. When they opened the box, however, it was full of rats; the family’s lovingly curated past had been chewed and shredded into oblivion. “All the precious mementos were gone,” writes Smith in her latest memoir Bread Of Angels. “Baptismal certificates and fragile newspaper clippings… the first half of the 20th century randomly captured through the lens of an old box camera.”