'I have lived in my own book': Patti smith and the reconstruction of her public persona in life writing

Abstract

In 2010, Patti Smith published her first memoir, Just Kids, winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book recounts Smith's relationship with avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as her involvement in New York City's burgeoning bohemian downtown scene. Five years later, she published a second memoir, M Train, a much more experimental narrative that goes back and forth in time and mixes dream and reality in an attempt to convey her nostalgic recollection of the past. This paper examines Patti Smith's memoirs as a space where different genres of life writing converge, thus enabling the development of a multilayered, richly constructed narrative self whose identity is intimately connected with loss, self-discovery and the making of art. The analysis of her autobiographical prose works allows us to regard life writing as a way for women to devise a public image of their own.