Smith makes friends with real people: Zac the coffee maker who buys his own café in Rockaway Beach, the secretary of the Alfred Wegener society that Smith belongs to, her friend Klaus, the Director at the Frida Kahlo museum Casa Azul, who helps her into Frida’s bed when she’s sick, but the living seem to be shadowy, passing presences, less real than the ghosts she carries with her: her husband, her brother, her mother, Jean Genet, William Blake, William Burroughs, Friedrich Schiller, Sylvia Plath, Nikola Tesla, and Frida Kahlo to name a few. Smith encourages the reader to participate in this creative collaboration, which takes place in snippets of dreams, in remembered adventures with her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died suddenly of a heart attack, in various cafes, and in snatches of ideas written on napkins and envelopes. The book presents nineteen essays that stand alone, but also interlink, vacillating organically through time and space. Perhaps it’s a book where “nothing” happens: nothing becomes something.

She opens it with a phrase from a dream that haunts her: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” Those of us who recognise her intense grief, and the determination to capture these experiences in poetic prose, will disagree with her that this is a book about nothing. Smith would have us believe that M Train is a book about nothing. It’s as if she has become such an old friend, that our presence doesn’t disturb her deep introspection. While all of those Pattis come across as the real deal, mingling an exotic hunger for linguistic transcendence with super chic cutting edge, the Patti Smith of M Train is an older, softer, and lonelier Patti Smith who invites us to join in her solitary world as she drinks seemingly endless cups of black coffee in various places around the world and meditates on the nature of the writing process and what it means to be a sentient being on this earth.

The Patti Smith of M Train is not quite Patti Smith the rock and roll legend, not quite Patti Smith the beat poet, and not quite Patti Smith the young partner of Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970s NY of Just Kids. You feel, by reading her that you know her, intimately, without the barrier of skin.

There’s an almost painful honesty that pervades everything Patti Smith does.

My train patti smith