Patti Smith famously loves coffee. In M Train she often sits at New York's Café 'Ino, drinks it black, and writes in a notebook. A book, a journey, or someone dead may come to mind. Just as the reader follows her far away, thought returns to the table. Anyone expecting a rock star's rise may initially feel disoriented.
She is indeed a major musician and the author of Just Kids. Yet M Train, published in 2015, does not continue assembling a comprehensive celebrity career. Performances, records, and awards no longer organize the account. Cafés, old clothes, detective programs, and her late husband Fred recur instead. The Patti Smith easily summarized by others takes more time to know here.
She has explained that M first stands for mind: a train following thought. This is not a travelogue of fixed stations. A present detail summons the past; the past changes her feeling about the present. Readers sit with her for a while and see where a cup of coffee takes them.
A Lost Black Coat
One black coat occupies Smith's thoughts. A birthday gift, already old and ill-fitting, it was subsequently lost. Another could provide warmth, shelter from wind, perhaps even better looks. What she misses is not an empty place in the wardrobe but a garment that had accompanied many journeys.
Age and poor fit did not diminish affection. She knew how it felt, and its wear belonged to its familiar appearance. We may not want the same coat, yet readily understand. Measured by price and function, a replacement might be no worse. The days spent wearing the original cannot be purchased with it.
This need not be explained as sophisticated collecting. Many people have something they resist replacing, though they often begin by defending their supposed irrationality. Smith gives the coat space without immediately turning attachment into an argument about consumption, ecology, or taste.
One pleasure of the book is that objects retain their particular appearance even within literature. We first understand her liking, then notice how repeated use joins an object to a life. Loss makes that connection especially clear.
Objects cannot preserve the past forever. Even finding an identical coat would not restore its presence on those journeys. Writing can communicate the connection, not guarantee that whatever is recorded can never be lost again.
He Had Not Read Genet, but Helped Her Find the Stones
A deeper attachment is to Fred Smith, her musician husband. They lived in Michigan and had children; he died in 1994. M Train does not recount him in an orderly marriage timeline. He appears through recollections, some strange and intensely private.
One journey takes them to French Guiana. Inspired by Jean Genet, Smith wanted stones from the former penal colony at Saint-Laurent, intending to get them to the writer. Fred had not read Genet, yet prepared maps and supplies and traveled with her. When she found the stones, he provided a handkerchief to wrap their small box.
The memory offers more than a supportive husband indulging a hobby. Fred need not become a Genet reader or share her precise literary feeling before taking her wish seriously. Her determination may have been partly incomprehensible to him. He did not dismiss it as pointless; he knew she wanted to go and helped in ways he knew.
Intimate interests seldom coincide completely. We sometimes assume understanding requires explaining why someone cares and ultimately caring identically ourselves. Otherwise we can only advise abandoning the idea. This story suggests another possibility: I do not have all your feelings, but I can accompany you. Your wish need not first become mine to receive a serious response.
Fred had dreams of his own. In an Audible interview, Smith recalls buying an old boat that could not sail and keeping it in the yard. In suitable weather they sat aboard, listening to ballgames, reading, or talking. By functional efficiency it was a failed boat. By time shared on it, it became a memorable place.
In the same interview, she describes unrealized plans, including inventing entire films. Some dreams produced action; others supplied pleasurable imagining. Retrospectively we so often ask whether a project succeeded that failure seems to invalidate the earlier time. But conversations in the yard were part of their common life. No finished film or launched boat was needed to confer significance afterward.
Such memories also keep Fred from becoming merely a writer's dead husband. He prepared luggage, liked boats, and shared plans outsiders might find unremarkable. Loss cannot fit into one word for grief because the preceding relationship was so particular.
A Photograph Is Also Something One Can Do
Smith visits places associated with writers and artists and photographs objects they used. M Train includes her Polaroids: belongings, rooms, and graves become another record of memory. An unfamiliar name need not stop reading. Follow why she wanted to visit. In interviews she says that mentioning books is a way of sharing work she loves.
Speaking with PBS, she offers the ordinary example of holding a favorite coffee cup of her father's and feeling memories of him approach. A cup does not provide a whole biography. It can bring back something of being together. Artists' belongings carry a similar attraction. Creation occurred not only in completed masterpieces but beside particular tables and in particular rooms.
A 2016 City Arts & Lectures conversation gives a more immediate reason for taking photographs seriously. After Fred and her brother died, she was too exhausted to write or draw, yet wanted to do something. A Polaroid camera was available. She arranged still lifes and made pictures; seeing an image quickly in her hand gave a sense of having completed an act.
That process deserves closer attention than “art healed her.” Photography was not a switch that removed grief. It was something possible with the energy then available, different from her usual work. The consolation need not instruct everybody to pick up a camera. A person temporarily unable to do familiar things may still find another way to make contact with the present world.
Nor is the book uniformly solemn. Smith enjoys detective programs and the mental work of recognizing clues and following answers, which she compares with artistic work in the PBS conversation. Someone who visits writers' graves and treasures old manuscripts can also talk enthusiastically about television. The interests are not ranked; together they resemble a life.
A novelist's desk and a television detective each attract her. From the perspective of a stage identity, these might look like marginal branches. Her own account gives the branches considerable room. Knowing someone sometimes requires listening to what resists easy classification.
There Can Still Be a New Place by the Sea
The memoir repeatedly writes loss without remaining entirely in the past. Smith bought a dilapidated cottage at Rockaway. Hurricane Sandy soon devastated the boardwalk and neighborhood, damaging the house too. It did not survive untouched. In the 2016 conversation, she says repairs took years and she subsequently wrote there.
That later information prevents the new home from becoming a romantic refuge outside material reality. Loving a house still entails repairs, expense, and accident. Yet while remembering the dead, she can become attached to a present place and want to restore it. Memory and expectation need not wait for each other to finish.
As the house finds a place, the book's time becomes clearer. Smith explains that recollection happens within current life: she is walking or sitting in a café, then remembers. The past is not a sealed volume requiring deliberate reopening. It appears during today's distraction and accompanies the next activity. Journeys, objects, and grief therefore cannot simply be reordered by date.
M Train does not settle the final accounts of these fragments. Some dreams never became careers, some relationships cannot continue, and some possessions really are gone. Earlier affection and companionship are not thereby void. Written down, they retain different weights and something an outsider may never entirely understand.
That is why the book rewards unhurried reading. We need not learn to become a legend from Smith. We can let her temporarily put the legend aside, sit at the table, and describe the days that never made the résumé.