Kindle Price: $14.99

Save $3.01 (17%)

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

M Train: A Memoir Kindle Edition

4.4 out of 5 stars 2,638

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” (Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.”

M Train 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. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.  
 
Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids,
M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.

Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith
Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Wonderful . . . M Train is about being lost and found. It weaves poetry, dreams, art, literature, and conversational fragments into a phantasmagoric, atmospheric, and transportive whole . . . Smith’s journeys take her across decades, continents, and the vistas of her own mind. She is a generous, charming, and brilliant guide. In her loneliness, her cherished possessions take on talismanic significance. . . She has no self-consciousness about the art she loves, and the truths they afford her are honest and hard won. By the end of the book, she has purchased a bungalow, drunk innumerable cups of black coffee, and come to some resolutions about her life, none of them easy or pat.” —Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe

“In the span of
M Train, Smith distills ineffable, tragic human existence into a collection of experiences, meditating on the intangible permanence of loss over a lifetime. Through freely associated vignettes and artful snapshots of her life, the artist creates an elegy for objects, people and muses she’s left behind. Smith’s M Train demonstrates, once again, her ability to turn a phrase or an image on its head. Whether she writes of a dream or a lost coat, she connects threads of memory, pain and the absurdity of human experience. Smith is as captivating narrating a meal as she is illustrating the nature of masterpiece . . . M Train floats languorously from past to present, from dream to waking moment. Smith’s work embodies a constant yearning, and the effect of her amalgamated experiences is a picture of life that becomes about accepting loss. There’s a conceit carried through the book about writing when there’s nothing to say; in Smith’s moments of nothing, though, she says everything.” —Heather Scott Partington, Las Vegas Weekly

“Charming and non-pretentious—full of genuine delight. Smith slips beguilingly between present and past. Once a muse, now she muses. Once an icon of alternative culture, she now loves to sit in anonymity at her favorite Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Thanks to
M Train, we can see Smith clearly: a woman who doesn’t speak in our era’s languages of snark, irony, and one-upmanship. While she’s a veteran of punk rock, she doesn’t appear to have a reservoir of anger or bitterness. She’s hardly forgotten the losses in her life. But she moves forward, ever delighted to see what’s now and what’s next: ‘We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts draw us away.’” —Randy Dotinga, Christian Science Monitor

“Smith’s lyrical prose is potent . . . insightful. She clearly knows herself. She is a survivor in every sense of the word. Her grappling with loss pours out of the book. The title begs the question: Where does the
M Train go? Nowhere. And, everywhere. Perhaps I naively believed that Patti Smith had all the answers. She doesn’t. Like all of us, she harbors confusions, gets grumpy without coffee, and holds fascinations with certain people and things. She probes the peculiar depths of human listlessness. It’s worth settling down with this book and a cup of joe.” —Paula Mejia, Newsweek

“Packed with thoughtful prose and keen observations . . . The prose of
M Train floats. Patti Smith paints solitude as beguiling and essential. M Train doesn’t glorify sadness or loneliness, nor does it suggest that Smith walks this present-day Earth through a tunnel of malaise. Rather, she travels around the world, finding solace in specific cafes in every city. She keeps her own company, and her sense of humor remains intact. Smith has always been a poet first and foremost—before she was ever a performer. Here, she has created a book that so many of us wish to write, one that parses what it all means. Smith doesn’t sound like she has it all figured out, but she does have stories that serve as markers in her journey as an artist.” —Kathy Iandoli, Pitchfork

“This gorgeously written book—sprinkled with richly detailed memoires of Fred Smith and often dreamlike in structure—is likely to prove revelatory even to longtime fans.” —Brian McCollum,
Detroit Free Press

“ Thrilling . . . Like Patti Smith’s life,
M Train feels guided simultaneously by determination and serendipity . . . Each chapter is set in motion by a Proustian moment that provokes an unpredictable chain of memory and observation, one thing talking to another. To the degree that we’re led to imagine the life of the book’s author, that life feels familiar, even ordinary, the life of a woman who was once a dreamy girl in New Jersey. But simultaneously, the life feels exotic, extraordinary, the life of a woman who has visited places and seen things that, without her having written about them, we would never imagine . . . S mith the writer is well-known as both a musician and a visual artist, but writing has always lain at the center of her achievement. But it’s one thing to write a great rock-and-roll lyric and another thing to write a book like M Train . . . The punk chanteuse has become the irresistible siren of middle age, and she has done so not by surviving but by refusing to settle for the glamour of past accomplishment. Except for what she will do next, M Train is the most beautiful thing she’s ever made.” —James Longenbach, The Nation

“A remarkably intimate look at Smith’s life in New York City. Throughout she bounces between home and her favorite Greenwich Village café, where she writes in her notebook and ponders the past. Memories of her childhood, her extensive travels and her marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith provide points of departure for the narrative. At once poetic and direct,
M Train reflects Smiths inquisitive, exploratory spirit . . . Like her trademark attire—boots, cap, coat—her narratives have a plainspoken beauty that transcends the times. An American original and a magical writer, Smith makes the reader believe in the redemptive power of art.” —Julie Hale, BookPage

“Sublime—sparse and poetic . . . Patti Smith can make sitting alone on her stoop on New Year’s Eve, watching the drunken revelers, seem like the coolest thing in the world.” —Suzi Feay,
Financial Times

“Smith began her career writing poetry books and for rock magazines (including this one). So it’s no surprise that the successor to
Just Kids is no boilerplate rock-star flash back. M Train is an impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, and epiphanies, a meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one . . . Smith’s caffeinated flow has charm, and the beauty of her writing breaks through . . . She is a generation’s great medium, freestyling séances over diner coffee, across years of magical thinking.” —Will Hermes, Rolling Stone

“Smith’s prose moves seamlessly from the literary to the cinematic, from the musical (Mendelssohn, Puccini) to, perhaps most surprisingly, the televisual. One of the many joys of reading
M Train is learning about Smith's obsession with detective serials . . . That fascination ripples through M Train, whose inclusion of Polaroids of everyday objects at times feels like a series of endless clues that would no doubt help us unlock Smith's own train of thought—were it not so much more entertaining following it aimlessly instead. Every page feels like an invitation to another world, another portal being opened, another rabbit hole to be dug, to be followed, to be lost in . . . Her sentences bring to life those authors and loved ones she’s lost but carries within her.” —Manuel Betancourt, Slant Magazine

“The legendary singer-songwriter takes readers on a journey through love, loss and a vanishing New York.
M Train is as filled with words [and] images: pictures she’s taken of talismans she’s traveled the world to capture, or gathered from her life in New York. Frida Kahlo’s crutches. Sylvia Plath’s headstone. Her husband’s passport photo. It is a collection of memento mori, of dreamlike remembrances of journeys to cemeteries and penal colonies and the hurricane-devastated boardwalk of Rockaway Beach, the end of a favorite crime show, a Haruki Murakami novel accidentally abandoned.” —Rob Smith,Amtrak Arrive

For those who read Just Kids and adored Smith’s voracious appetite for art and praise of writers and poets, M Train will not disappoint . . . Smith found her way to music through poetry, and her prose reflects her history. Still, what is most affecting in her writing is not just her use of words; she describes being a human with such depth that you close the book feeling as if you know her . . . She loved, mothered, and learned so deeply that she transcended her famous self, and touched in with something at the core of humanity. It is in her descriptions of the everyday that the artist in her shows clearest . . . In writing, she finds a family long after her husband and friends are gone, and to our great fortune, she chose to share them with readers.” —Emily Neuberger, Everyday eBook

“Writer, artist, and musician (to some, the High Priestess of Punk), Patti Smith gifts the literary world and a whole new generation of fans with another look into her singular mind, piquant curiosities, and otherworldly experiences
.” —Emily Barasch, vogue.com

“A book of memory. Smith gives spirituality to coffee—this book is an ode to it—a ‘post-Beat meditation’ on Smith’s ‘substance of choice.’ The objects of
M Train are full of life. As Smith ages, so does the totemic power that surrounds her.” —Anna Heyward, T, The New York Times Style Magazine

“Complex and enchanting . . . Smith’s writing is easy and direct; her indomitable curiosity is obvious on every page. Certain words flicker like mica. Sundry fleeting images of places she has visited; montages of observations, with the deep references of a collector or scholar; by turns warm, wary, cagey, detached, and involved, each sentence leaves details to be considered further. It’s energetic writing and compelling storytelling that actually sound like the author enjoys relating. Patti makes being wise and smart such appealing qualities . . . These views into her life often seem so fantastical one could feel they are reading fiction, if we didn’t know better, and if her moody photographs throughout weren’t there for proof as well. Purely fascinating and glorious to read.” —Peter Holsapple,
The Daily Beast

“Amazing. Marvelous—funny and tender and sad, simple, soulful and rigorous . . . One of the things I love most about Patti Smith is the way she makes you interested in other things. In
M Train, she takes you on a journey that includes Frida Kahlo, Bobby Fischer, TV series The Killing and Sylvia Plath . . . She even manages to make grief beautiful. The real thrill, though, is how funny she is. Really hilarious, in a way that you just wouldn’t expect . . . One of the other things that struck me is how pure Patti Smith’s life is. She lives it at her own pace, with no entourage or staff or hangers-on . . . Smith inspires hope and courage and confidence—surely the things that matter most in life.” —Porter

“Potent . . . The M Train is a Magical Mystery line that Smith rides, her snaking Mental trains of thought carrying her into Memoryland, as well as into reveries on subjects as wide-ranging as her passionate appetite for detective stories, and her surprising membership in a scientific society devoted to the subject of continental drift. Smith travels far afield geographically, too, making pilgrimages to the homes and graves of beloved writers and artists. Ultimately, it's the local stops on M Train that make the most profound impressions . . . Smith’s suffered a lot of losses, [and]
M Train is about enduring [that] erosion. She has weathered storms, but as she eloquently demonstrates in M Train there's a spooky beauty in those ramshackle things, and people that defy conventional wisdom—and keep on standing.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“Spare and elliptical—part dream diary, part travelogue, and shot through with sobering reflections on age and impermanence. Smith’s passion is undiminished: for good books, strong coffee, a poem or painting or a beautiful piece of music she can get lost in. She’ll travel thousands of miles just to take a Polaroid. But she’s not a culture snob; TV detectives enthrall her nearly as much as French philosophers and Russian novelists. Fans of
Just Kids will find [here] a different kind of beauty: bittersweet and battered by time and circumstance, but still somehow full of grace.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“A memoir that blends a lifetime of memories with everyday experience,
M Train moves in several arcs at once, fading in and out of dreams, jumping between subjects and years like a stone skipped across a lake. It contains elements of manifesto, passionate tributes to the writers she reveres, accounts of some of Smith’s stranger travels and vivid passages of her continual search for artistic inspiration. Memory and love weigh heavily on Smith’s mind as she writes . . . M Train is filled with wonder—[it is] a tribute to people and to sacred things, to Smith’s own artistic calling, part of her effort to give permanence to what’s departed. And so she brings those dreams, those lost loves, those sacred objects into being. M Train is Smith’s treatise on life’s purpose and meaning, and why a worn and tattered black jacket can be cherished beyond all reason, can be treasured with the same fervor as the world’s most celebrated art.” —Eric Swedlund, Paste

“A beautifully composed account of travels and pilgrimages, told through words and photographs—a touching and extraordinarily well-crafted book that for all its formal architecture flows as naturally as if Smith were singing one of her songs. Though the book has been described as a travel memoir, that is a frame on which to hang a multilayered meditation on loss, making art, mortality and the sacred. A multimedia work, featuring her austere photographs, it is also a musical book, with its own rhythm, color and dynamics. Smith grounds the reader with a recurrent image of herself at home base—drinking black coffee at her favorite Greenwich Village café—then launches into quietly vivid descriptions of various pilgrimages. Invariably, the real-time trips melt into dreams, ruminations on art, childhood recollections and reminiscences. Some of the book is taken up with plain great yarns, like the time she wound up singing Buddy Holly songs with Bobby Fischer. Indeed, Smith appears to take a disarming pleasure in exposing her own vulnerability . . . She weaves these threads—loss, coffee, death, a beach cafe, dreams, pilgrimages, memory, childhood, [a] cowpoke—like the musical themes of a softly unfolding fugue, eventually coming to rest in a dream, one prefigured in an early passage of the book. Nicely done.” —Paul de Barros,
The Seattle Times

“Patti Smith writes exquisitely. She is a survivor whose dreams prod her to ‘redeem the lost’ by writing about them.
M Train evokes people who died far too young, including—most devastatingly—her husband, and her brother, who died exactly one month later . . . Unlike the relatively straightforward, chronological narrative of Just Kids, M Train drifts fluidly between a fugue state of memories, dreams, and a largely solitary present. But it is also energized by her keen interests and obsessions. These include her passion for coffee and her beloved neighborhood cafés, where she writes on scraps of napkins; a rundown property she buys near the beach in Far Rockaway, just weeks before Hurricane Sandy; television detective mysteries, which she binge-watches; and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle . . . Elegiac, melancholic, and meditative, filled with wistful flashbacks and haunting Polaroid snapshots.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Deeply personal, lovely, vivid . . . In 1994, Smith lost her husband to heart failure, and her brother to stroke. Those losses, and newer, fresher sorrows, pierce her elegiac
M Train, which in its own elliptical way is as much a love story about her late husband as Just Kids, her stunning memoir of youth and bohemia, was about Robert Mapplethorpe . . . [Her] peripatetic life is chronicled in M Train, a series of journeys through cities, hotels, dreams and memories. The M stands for mind, and Smith is her train’s conductor. As such, she has written a book that is memoirish, but not strictly a memoir—a Proustian tour of love, loss and survival, leavened with comedic digressions. Smith is clearly game for anything, and chasing her obsessions, she winds up in curious places . . . As a writer she must go it alone. And as a writer still making peace with devastating loss, it is a given that whatever she’s writing is haunted by ghosts. Books are her deepest love, and writing them is clearly her keenest ambition.” —Penelope Green, The New York Times
“A work whose charm has much to do with its lithe resistance to contradictions of genre . . .
M Train comes in the form of fragments of waking fantasy, literary commentaries, reminiscences, evocations of lost objects, travel notations. By turns it is daybook, dreambook, commonplace book. Under all lies grief. M Train represents a sort of negotiation (through rites of pilgrimage, writing, art, and divination by tarot card) with the implacable forces of the world. Its unapologetic informality [is] a bit like the title of the old Bill Evans album, Conversations with Myself—the quality of laying out the contents of one’s mind to see what they look like. Writing about nothing is after all one of the most ancient and gratifying of literary practices, often so much more rewarding than more formal chronicles and autobiographies, and for that reason something that always feels a bit illicit.”—Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books

“Patti Smith loves coffee. It courses through
M Train like a dark, steaming river, connecting her various adventures . . . She writes—and, judging by her memoirs, acts—as if the world were brimful with the divine. There are no fixed boundaries: her dreams seep through her waking hours, she journeys on a whim. She is a person for whom the material world veils—flimsily—a set of more lasting, luminous truths. These are the truths of art, genius, fate. She is an unreconstructed Romantic, which makes reading her rather like time travel. M Train might start somewhere like the present day, but soon Smith is transported across years and continents, and off we go with her, like neophytes accompanying a seasoned pilgrim. When it comes to popular music, our collective memory tends to be short, but Smith resists that kind of temporality: her mind is with the immortals. Toward the end [of the book] she expresses something close to a creed: ‘Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.’ Her theology [is] served with uncommon resolve. If you happen to spot her in the West Village, buy her a coffee—or instead, pour a cup out for her, in the manner of a true libation.” —Anwen Crawford, newyorker.com, “Cultural Comment”

“Patti Smith is a great artist, but she might be a greater fan of art, in all its many forms. While her bestselling
Just Kidswas a largely straightforward memoir of her youth in New York, M Train is a simulation of what it is like to live inside her brain . . . What ties together the things she loves is their romance, their intensity, their dignity. There is a hint of poetry in each of them. By naming such a vast network of influences, she is giving dreamy, young readers a roadmap to her haute bohemian life, with coffee and travel and dreams . . . I want to vacation in Patti Smith’s mind. Because M Train isn’t just a roadmap; it’s an archive, too. It’s Smith, often alone and haunted by so many intimate ghosts, preparing herself for precisely the thing we make art to confront—and defy: mortality . . . M Train is a monument to the timeless creations of humans doomed to die. It’s hard to imagine how anyone in our long history can have loved them as much as she does.” —Judy Berman, Flavorwire

“Sublime. Smith, poet and shaman, [is] an American icon, a vagabond child of rock ’n’ roll who fused it with her own, fiercely honest poetry . . . When
Just Kids, her rapturous labor of love, was received with acclaim (and a National Book Award), some were surprised. The Mother Courage of Punk can write! Her new memoir, M Train, will leave no one in doubt that she has long since been a member of what she calls that secret society of writerly bums and obsessed alchemists panning for a drop of gold. M Train—the title signifies a ‘mind train’ that goes to any station it wants—is a collection of true stories concerning irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is.” —John Heilpern, Vanity Fair

“Captivating . . . rich, varied. How to mourn for what’s lost without allowing loss to take over? While leaving space for what’s lost to return in an old or new form? These are the questions at the heart of
M Train, [which] takes us on a journey through the ‘stuff’ of Smith’s bookshelves and suitcases, as well as of her mind and memory . . . M Train embraces the fragment—moments of reverie [that] arise from the mundane. Integrated into the text are Polaroid photographs [that are] in productive tension with the text, as in the novels of W.G. Sebald, whose work Smith greatly admires. While it is perhaps a cliché to call such a book ‘dream-like,’ M Train truly moves with the logic of dreams, and Smith gives equal consideration to her dreams as she does to her waking experience. But what makes M Train feel most like a dream is its slippery, mystical relationship to time. Smith imbues it with such a haze that she appears to board a plane to Berlin as seamlessly as she walks to the corner deli. This loose relationship to time allows [her] to appreciate aspects of the contemporary world through an anachronistic lens; it’s as if Smith is enamored with the present moment insomuch as it allows her access to the past . . . Smith is all too aware that much of what gets lost is irreplaceable: ‘Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.’ The journey of M Train through Smith’s ‘stuff,’ we come to understand, is itself an incantation of this plea.” —Sara Jaffe, San Francisco Chronicle

“Achingly beautiful . . . a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance . . . Smith is remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial. Like her famous Polaroid photos (some of which are scattered throughout the book), the chapters of
M Train are magic lantern slides, jumping, free-associatively, between the present and the past. Whereas Just Kids centered on her early years in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s, this volume chronicles her peregrinations around the world and into the recesses of her imagination; its unities are not of time and place, but the landscape of Smith’s own mind. The ghosts of artists haunt these pages, as do the spirits of her beloved husband and brother. And a dark melody of loss threads its way through this volume. Her favorite coat—lost. Her favorite Murakami book—left in an airport bathroom. Her favorite camera—left on a beach. Her favorite café—closed. Smith buys a tiny house near Rockaway Beach, and while it somehow survives Hurricane Sandy, she witnesses the myriad losses of her neighbors—the boardwalk turned to splinters, hundreds of homes burned to the ground . . . If Just Kids was about starting out as an artist and setting forth in the world, M Train feels more like a look at the past through a rearview mirror . . . An eloquent—and a deeply moving—elegy for what she has ‘lost and cannot find’ but can remember in words.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Marvelous . . .
M Train is a book of days, a year in the life, a series of reflections; it concerns itself with reckoning. Its episodes find Smith at home in Greenwich Village, on the road in Japan or London or Mexico City, looking back and forth across the days. M Train is a book about the process of its own creation, a slice of life with skeleton exposed. Like memory, it flows in and out of the present, as Smith goes on about the business of existence—writing, performing, traveling, pondering. [She] has always represented aspiration as much as achievement, the idea that art ennobles us by bringing us in contact with some thread of thought or feeling larger than ourselves. The message is that living is a kind of invocation, or better yet, a form of prayer.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Profoundly strong . . . After reading
M Train, it will be clear to any reader that Smith’s formidable twin powers of rhetoric and compassion cast the kind of spell that one must return to over and over again . . . Each chapter treats an important loss in her life, from her heartbreaking historical moments as the death of her husband, to such private griefs as the sudden misplacement of her favorite coat. Shemoves between reflections on actual events through the use of dreamscapes; she crafts fluid transitions between her event memory, her creative instincts to romantically transform the real event, and her meditations on how to cope with what she’s learned. The train is her metaphor for dreaminess, [and] we glide into each station—some of them faraway sojourns—with her. Smith sees soul in the smallest pebbles. She respects that life is full of loose and lost ends . . . Smith’s [photographs] serve both as a wonderfully tight anchor to the stories in the text as well as a sort of unusual history museum unto themselves . . . The real delight is how simply and daily she strives to embrace those mundane realities with which we all struggle. In the constant grip of what has been lost and mourned and pulled toward the abyss, she just wants readers to be human with her, to be familiar to the kind of compassion that ultimately bolsters an optimism needed for making life livable.” —Megan Volpert, PopMatters

“Exquisite . . . a magical, mystical tour de force that begins in a tiny Greenwich Village café and ends as a dream requiem, encompassing an entire lost world . . . As perceptive and beautifully written as its predecessor,
Just Kids, Smith’s new memoir is a record of a lifelong pilgrim, filled with mementos mori and personal accounts of her travels, her artistic obsessions and inspirations. Smith writes poignantly. Like her first memoir, this one probes a deep emotional core. Don’t read M Train expecting revelations of a rock star excess. It is a Proustian reverie [and a] bibliophile’s trove, with striking insights into the books that ignited Smith’s imagination. Mostly, Smith comes across as a lover: of literature, of art and music, of her children and late husband; of her parents and siblings, friends and mentors, many of whom have died. There’s an elegiac tone to much of M Train, yet there is extraordinary joy here, too. Her own journey continues, illuminated by her openness to the world and her compassionate, questing spirit . . . Readers who share in Smith’s transcendent pilgrimage may find themselves reborn.” —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post

“When the high priestess of punk-rock poetry won the National Book Award for
Just Kids, she set a new literary standard for celeb autobiography. In [M Train], she explores a variety of loves (coffee, TV crime dramas, travel, her husband) and losses (her favorite café, her favorite coat, her favorite boardwalk, her husband). Intellectually rigorous and generously layered with cultural references, M Train is the closest thing Patti Smith fans have to walking the world in her shoes.” —Emily Rems, Bust

“Smith’s National Book Award-winning
Just Kids created a juggernaut of interest in her life as a musician, performer and photographer. Her new memoir takes a different tone and agenda—that of a wise earth mother, literary shaman, and television crime-show junkie, imparting the rituals, routines, loves, and losses that have guided her long, productive artistic career. At the same table in tiny Café ’Ino, she scribbles notes on napkins as she pores over the books of beloved Beat poets, surrealists and select others [who] have long inspired and sustained her . . . M Train’s nonlinear narrative is beautifully in thrall to Smith’s restless imagination and dream life . . . Pure Patti.” —Lisa Shea, ELLE

“Luminous . . . It’s pleasurable to accompany rock icon Smith—mother, widow, artist—in her new memoir as she applies her fine mind and humane wit to various pilgrimages and projects, including coming to terms with aging and loss. Smith describes a game she invented to fight insomnia and invite visions; it involves uttering a stream of words beginning with the same letter. Let’s play: The book is mesmerizing, mischievous, moral, meaningful, mourning, merry, marvelous.” —Judith Stone,
More

“Extraordinary . . . If
Just Kids was Smith’s requiem to New York City gone by, then M Train is her requiem for the moment. Through vivid recollections of dreams and snapshots from her global voyages, Smith weaves a complex narrative

About the Author

PATTI SMITH is the author of Just Kids, which won the National Book Award in 2010, and of five collections of poetry. Her seminal album, Horses, has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres; she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00S3RILU8
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (October 6, 2015)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 6, 2015
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 61078 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 277 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1408867699
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 2,638

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Patti Smith
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred debut albums of all time by Rolling Stone.

Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.

In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 1980, she married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
2,638 global ratings
I'll Follow Patti Smith Anywhere
5 Stars
I'll Follow Patti Smith Anywhere
Profound, quiet, with such a sense of grace.
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2015
This is a surprisingly compelling book. I have followed Smith's music and writings since the 1970s, and had the great fortune to meet her at the 2010 Miami Book Fair. I'm still unsure as to why I find her so intriguing. This is an unpretentious and often rambling book, dwelling frequently on what could only be considered the mundane activities of everyday life. But Smith somehow draws the reader in. Her trips abroad, largely brought about by literary quests, provide interesting insights into what she finds worthy. Interspersed with these episodes, Smith reveals the loss she felt subsequent to her husband's death, and what can only be described as her philosophy of life. In addition to the more serious stuff, one finds that she lives with three cats, drinks a lot of coffee and devotes considerable time to just thinking and writing. Like her previous book "Just Kids," this book is required reading for Smith fans and those wanting to get to know her better.
3 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2018
M TRAIN is a better book IMHO than her JUST KIDS, though the latter won a National Book Award. This book is a collage of memories and experiences narrated in non linear fashion, interwoven with with dream sequences. It's a book about solitude, grieving a lost loved one, courage, and recreating the self. I keep thinking about this book even though I finished two weeks ago. There is much humor in the book, too, in Smith's deadpan way; some of the situations she puts herself into or gets invited into are amusing or endearing, making me smile. Other situations, especially one or two memoirs about Fred Sonic Smith are very sad but Smith rises above the sadness. I am 61 years old and I learned something about life from this book. Thank you Patti.
One person found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2015
I have just finished "M Train". My mind is still in a stew of words and visions. Ms. Smith has flawlessly uttered. Many of the reviews for this book state its a very differant tome then "Just Kids", and I 100 percent agree. Just Kids was about the journey of the artist. Struggles, pains and ultimatly growth and becoming. M Train is purely about rumination and pontifiction with no particular order, other then the low and high points of Ms.Smith's loves and losses.
The Cafe Ino is her entry way into the "M Train", which she alone conducts and rides on. Ino is sadly gone now, but Patti's words will live on in this text. I highly recommened this book to people who are bewitched by the craft and ritual involved in writing. The author effortlessly puts it all down and shares it with us, from her favorite pen to her most beloved objects that surround her when she creates. Patti once said "The finest gift a writer can impart is the desire to write", and her words are evidence of such. Sumptuous phrases illustrating travels from Paris to LA, London to Berlin.Missing coats-lost luggege and a wealth of detective shows poured over with zealous passion. A chorus of faces come and gone, from secret groups to dear friends. Its the art of words at its highest point.
As a fledgling writer myself, I will carry this book with me wherever go.

Chris Cipollini
12 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2021
In a world of fakes and poseurs, Patti Smith is the genuine article, an artist deeply absorbed in poetry and music. She's been recognized with at least three premier international awards, but she still spits onstage. Bless her tangled waves of gray.

Her pilgrimage to Gide's prison, her optimistic investment in a seaside bungalow despite the wreckage of storm Sandy, her insistence on reminding us of Rimbaud and Burroughs, and Maplethorpe--and every other artist, musician, and personage that she adores. She is for real.

She is first an admirer, and--hats off to her--able to turn her admiration into her own art.

We frequented the same clubs, I knew her when she recited her poetry in St. Marks church. New York City in the 70s and 80s was a wonderful paradise that bloomed in trash and needle strewn streets.

I am not really sure it could happen again.
23 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2015
M Train is not part 2 of Just Kids. M Train is a gift from Patti Smith to her fans. This book takes us inside the mind of Patti Smith to places we never knew existed. What a complex and fascinating woman. Her words and visions are beautifully haunting. The memories she shares with us are brutally humble, sad and honest. This is not an upbeat read. Nevertheless M Train is a journey to all the special places Patti Smith reveres.
This book will stay with me for the rest of my days. I especially loved a quote from page 202. Thank you Patti Smith for writing M Train.
Thank you for your work and dedication to your art. Thank you for being you.
4 people found this helpful
Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
KarensHonestReview
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book! MUST READ!
Reviewed in Canada on November 18, 2023
I love that it has pages.
One person found this helpful
Report
Caroline Cassimiro Teixeira
2.0 out of 5 stars Livro em péssimas condições
Reviewed in Brazil on May 25, 2023
O livro pode até ser bom (ainda não li), mas chegou em péssimas condições.
Customer image
Caroline Cassimiro Teixeira
2.0 out of 5 stars Livro em péssimas condições
Reviewed in Brazil on May 25, 2023
O livro pode até ser bom (ainda não li), mas chegou em péssimas condições.
Images in this review
Customer image Customer image
Customer imageCustomer image
Alan Higuera
4.0 out of 5 stars Gran libro
Reviewed in Mexico on October 16, 2021
El libro llegó pegado de la peor forma posible, las páginas se desprenden fácilmente. Fuera de eso, grande Patti Smith, quiero que me adopte <3
Laura Distasi
5.0 out of 5 stars Love it!
Reviewed in Germany on October 3, 2023
Beautifully written. A must for Patti Smith Fans!
Chaitanya Sethi
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolute magic to read!
Reviewed in India on May 29, 2021
Patti Smith at her absolute finest. Who knew a book about drinking coffee, visiting the graves of dead poets, watching detective dramas, and thinking about art would be such a sublime piece of writing? I will say, you need to have read Just Kids before this, to truly appreciate the beauty and melancholy of M Train. But what a brilliant book!
4 people found this helpful
Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?