Patti Smith joined Dua Lipa at the London Literature Festival at Royal Festival Hall last night (Sunday October 25) for a moving conversation about the punk poet’s latest book, the memoir Bread Of Angels.
The book was published last year and follows Smith’s previous non-fiction tomes, Just Kids, M Train, Devotion, and The Year Of The Monkey, as well as several poetry collections. Bread Of Angels focuses initially on Smith’s upbringing in Philadelphia, before taking in the rest of her life so far, signposted by four different dresses given to her over the years by meaningful people, including her late husband Fred Sonic Smith, brother Todd and friend and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Lipa, who curated this year’s London Literature Festival with her Service95 Book Club, interviewed Smith about her latest book, exploring some of the stories inside.
Explaining the intention behind the memoir, Smith said: “It gave me a chance to show some gratitude to all the people that helped form me, and who I rebelled against too. My parents, my siblings, my teachers, people I met along the way, mentors and loves – all kinds of people. Even though it’s my own story, it shows that we are also a product of all the wisdom and all the experience that we have with others.”
Discussing what Lipa described as a “more conventional narrative” in this book, Smith added: “I wrote Just Kids because Robert asked me to write it hours before he died. I didn’t know anything about writing a memoir or nonfiction. I like to write poems and fairy tales, and it was so much responsibility and took me so long.
“I swore I’d never write another memoir, but truthfully, I had a dream where a messenger came to my house with a white book, and I opened it up, and it was a book that I had written, and it had all the stages of my life, and they were broken down through dresses. I felt that if I dreamed that, there was a reason – and I felt like all those people were calling, ‘Don’t forget us; write our little story too’.” Read the full article on NME HERE
