I remember Patti’s silhouette in a café near her home, caught in profile. Her hair floated in the steam rising from a white cup she held like a talisman. I hesitated, unsure whether to interrupt that magical, suspended moment. What does a writer crave “in a café in the earliest hours, in an empty drawing room of a hotel, or scrawling in a notebook in the pew of a silent cathedral”? It’s the question Patti Smith asks as she approaches eighty. And it was the question I silently posed the morning I met her for breakfast. I only found the answer later, reading her new memoir, Bread of Angels.

Here’s what she seeks: “A sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment.” As a child, she writes, she “cracked open rocks searching for their secret hearts.” To crack matter open in order to glimpse the imprisoned light inside—that’s the gesture of a wild mystic, a lineage she shares with the one she loved most, Arthur Rimbaud.

Panis angelicus—Thomas Aquinas’s line for the Eucharist’s broken bread, the “bread of angels” made into the bread of human beings—hovers in the background. Patti’s writing never evaporates into metaphysical vapor. It is physical, pulsing, stubbornly material: “The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump.” Her language moves like a musical score—full of repetitions, refrains, resonances—evoking Pollock’s splattered canvases or Coltrane’s late saxophone runs. It is both childlike and wise. At times it seems like the writing of a little girl who has somehow read Virginia Woolf; at other times, like the writing of an elderly mystic who has somehow preserved the shock of childhood, an inner condition she treats as permanent.

Patti doesn’t reconstruct her life; she resurrects it. Everything—the lost piano of her grandmother, the green sofa transformed into a family ark, the broken arm of a doll, the “glittering refuse” salvaged from garbage bins—becomes the mystery served at the table of her imagination. “A drop of water bursting as an equation,” she writes, and the fall of her Bugs Bunny toy becomes “like a Viking ship tumbling off the edge of the world.” Reality is inhabited by presences. She comes to sense that “God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper.” Even M&M’s—red, yellow, green—turn into “rubies, topaz, and emeralds laid bare in a shaft of sunlight.” Bread of Angels is an act of resistance against a culture of forgetting. Memory here isn’t an archive; it’s a living organism. Patti returns it to the body, to the pulse and texture of lived experience. In an age when everything vanishes into digital servers, she insists that remembering is physical—and therefore spiritual. When she encounters a snapping turtle that appears to her as an ancient deity, the moment becomes a small theophany. Her father, stunned, becomes a disciple before the mystery. “You are fine, just daydreaming,” he whispers to his daughter. It’s one of the most beautiful scenes in the book.

“I’d reach for the forbidden,” she writes. Not the moral forbidden, but what is uneven, excessive, marvelous: lighting a cigarette as a child with a silver lighter just “to produce a pretty flame,” burning her fingers in the process. This instinct for transgression pushed her to explore the world as though moving through a mystical perimeter without any “thought of maps.” If asked, “Where have you been?” she could only answer, “Nowhere, for it would have been impossible to explain.”

“What is the soul? What color is it?” Little Patti asks, pelting her mother with “endless metaphysical questions about Jesus and the angels and the ins and outs of heavenly bodies.” She belongs to that lineage of convent-less mystics running through American literature—from Emily Dickinson, the wayward nun, to Flannery O’Connor, the hillbilly Thomist.

Patti evokes her parents, her siblings, their endless moves. At the center of the narrative lies childhood illness: fever as trance, the sickroom as a Proustian chamber of quarantines and intermittent recoveries. From her bed, she watches herself, her mother cooling her forehead, the syringe gleaming like a charm. The improvised cures—dandelion tea, apple-cider vinegar—open a passageway into the invisible. Yet the same heightened gaze allows her to grasp the difference between a mail-order catalog and the editorial worlds of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, or to fall completely in love with Puccini. Art arrives that way: as revelation.

Her mother, the book’s gravitational center, is a proletarian Madonna—she smokes, works, and never gives up. She’s the one who gives Patti Silver Pennies, a slim anthology of poems that becomes her scripture. It’s an initiation into the poetic word: each poem a key to the unseen world. My mother “noted in my baby book that I was prone to falsehoods,” she recalls. But these aren’t lies; they are the birth of poetry, the discovery that language can generate reality: “Falsehoods. If the truth didn’t interest me, I presented an alternative reality.”

The book is steeped in sacred fidelity to people. Every portrait—family, friends, or the artists of her generation (Dylan, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Springsteen)—is an epiphany. So is the portrait of her husband Fred. With him, she learns that love is a mystery “that draws us from all that we know.” In others she loves—her brother Toddy, Robert Mapplethorpe—she is overwhelmed by their piercing duality, their refusal to be pinned down. And in herself she discovers “the tomboy who spurned girlish things, yet had secretly yearned for a Communion dress and veil.” Near the end comes a revelation about her origins—breathtaking yet incapable of shaking the deeper truth of her bonds.

“My next book is the story of my vocation as an artist,” Patti told me that morning in the café, referring to Bread of Angels. “Sometimes I wonder if it makes sense, while people are suffering, to sit eight hours a day and write. But this is my responsibility now—my possibility: poetry.” It is a prophetic charge: to write as an act of responsibility toward those who will come after. The book pulses with historical and political awareness yet never loses sight of the fact that her childhood prayers were powerful enough to “disrupt the ecosystem of fate.”