Years ago, Patti Smith wrote the beautiful memoir Just Kids, a book devoted to her formative years and to her intense, defining relationship with the late twentieth-century artist Robert Mapplethorpe. She deliberately chose to stop at the threshold of her first album, Horses. Readers would certainly have welcomed a flood of memories about punk-era New York, the recording of that debut, CBGB’s, or Max’s Kansas City. Yet Smith understood that lingering on that chapter would have overshadowed what truly mattered to her – tracing her spiritual and emotional formation, and honoring the immense love she shared with the boy alongside whom she dreamed so fiercely of life and art. Now, in her second book, Il pane degli angeli (The Bread of Angels), she returns to those years from a broader vantage point, one that moves beyond the 1970s and the so-called “New York New Music” scene without ever confining itself […]