Looking back in wonder, sorrow

Patti Smith's memoir traces her path from bleak childhood to glittering rock poet.

- LEIGH HABER

STEVEN SEBRING

THERE IS a romantic quality to the deprivations that Patti Smith chronicles.

"Bread of Angels," Patti Smith's mesmerizing new memoir, only deepens the mystery of who this iconic artist is and where her singular vision originated.

I've long been struck by her magnetism on stage, her fearless approach to her craft, and the stark beauty of her words on the page, including the National Book Award-winning “Just Kids.” She has a preternatural belief in her own instincts and a boundless curiosity that, taken together, help explain the extraordinarily rich life and oeuvre she's constructed.

This transcendent - and at times terrifying-account of that evolution enriches that understanding. And yet, Smith's persona remains veiled sphinx-like - an ethereal presence whose journey to fame was fueled by her questing spirit and later detoured by tragedy.

Like Jeannette Walls' classic, "The Glass Castle," Smith's saga begins with a hardscrabble childhood she relates as if narrating a Dickensian fairy tale. In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements.

Smith's mother was a waitress who also took in ironing.

Her father was a factory worker, a World War II veteran scarred by his experience abroad. They shared their love of poetry, books and classical music with their daughter, who was reading Yeats by kindergarten.