Patti Smith on Her Memoir “Bread of Angels,” Fifty Years After Her Début Album, “Horses”

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Speaker 6 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 8 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 7 Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

Speaker 8 That line, the opening to Patty Smith's album Horses, has got to be one of the best openers to an album ever.

Speaker 8 Amazing to think that Horses, which still feels fresh and raw and transgressive, came out almost 50 years ago this week.

Speaker 8 Horses launched Patty Smith to musical and avant-garde stardom almost overnight.

Speaker 8 And yet being a star wasn't Patty Smith's intention at all.

Speaker 8 She was a poet. She was publishing poems years before the record came out.
She'd written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was a kind of afterthought, as she tells it, an accompaniment to the words.

Speaker 8 Becoming one of the founding figures of punk was something that happened almost by accident. But in recent years, many people have come to know Patty Smith as a writer, as well as a performer.

Speaker 8 Her memoir, Just Kids, about her friendship with the late photographer Robert Maplethorpe, won the National Book Award. M.
Train reflected on her withdrawal from music as she raised a family.

Speaker 8 And in Bread of Angels, which was just excerpted in The New Yorker, Smith writes intimately about her life in music and also her personal life, particularly her marriage to Fred Sonic Smith and his early death.

Speaker 8 At times, she shares deep revelations about her past, and it's nothing if not a book of tremendous honesty.

Speaker 8 You say somewhere in the book that this book took you 10 years to write. Is that because life is just so busy, or the act of memory and the act of writing is is difficult?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, I was writing about difficult things, but also certain things in my life and things that came to pass, as you see in the book, things that were revealed to me made me, I had to stop for a couple of years and process.

Speaker 7 You know, I kept having to process things that were happening in real time

Speaker 7 or really

Speaker 7 make certain that I was

Speaker 7 you know, articulating fact

Speaker 7 properly, especially when I'm talking about other people.

Speaker 7 The same thing with just kids. It took me a very long time.
I mean, I write profusely, fiction, fairy tales, all kinds of things that aren't even published without a care.

Speaker 7 But writing a memoir, writing, bringing other people into it,

Speaker 7 one has to really be prudent and search themselves and make sure that they're presenting the right picture.

Speaker 8 what was the most difficult thing to encounter? You obviously write about the death of your husband, but toward the end of the book, you write about the revelation about your own family.

Speaker 8 And that seems particularly complicated, no?

Speaker 7 That was the most difficult part.

Speaker 8 Tell the story of that.

Speaker 7 The most difficult part of

Speaker 7 the writing process and

Speaker 7 just my process

Speaker 7 as a human being was the revelation

Speaker 7 that

Speaker 7 my father,

Speaker 7 who I pretty much worshipped and modeled myself after, and who I had spent a lot a lot of time in the earlier part of the book bringing to life, was actually not my blood father.

Speaker 7 I never knew this, of course,

Speaker 7 and although there was always a little speculation because I am a bit different than my siblings,

Speaker 7 I never resembled my father physically, though I modeled myself after him.

Speaker 7 And in learning this,

Speaker 7 it took me a long time to process. I wasn't angry.
I didn't feel any bitterness or anything of my mother. I

Speaker 7 admired her stoicness.

Speaker 7 If

Speaker 7 my mother knew that I

Speaker 7 how I felt about my father and in fact I often showed more love for my father than my mother. But instead of being resentful, I think she did everything she could to protect me.

Speaker 8 How did the revelation come to pass and when? How did you specifically find out about it?

Speaker 7 Specifically through a test.

Speaker 7 After my mother died,

Speaker 7 my sister and I we got curious.

Speaker 7 And just out of curiosity, which I thought really would

Speaker 7 not come up with anything,

Speaker 7 we did

Speaker 7 a test, but we didn't do a paternal test, we did a sibling test, a blood test, because we didn't know the difference. And so

Speaker 7 when we did the blood test, it showed that we were only half siblings,

Speaker 7 which was heartbreaking.

Speaker 7 It was heartbreaking

Speaker 7 only

Speaker 7 because

Speaker 7 I love my sister so much.

Speaker 7 I love my father so much.

Speaker 7 It was just the romance of blood. You know, really, she was still my sister a million percent.
My father was still my father.

Speaker 7 So that was,

Speaker 7 that produced a certain amount of pain, but also I had to.

Speaker 7 In terms of the book, I had worked so hard for this book to be a monument to truth and to be exactly as it was.

Speaker 10 And suddenly,

Speaker 7 I didn't know where I stood. I didn't know how to,

Speaker 7 I didn't know if I had to rewrite the book. I didn't know.
And I really put it away for a couple of years until I figured all of this out.

Speaker 7 And my sister and I together reconciled this. She was so helpful because we talked about it endlessly.
And one day she said she had an epiphany, and it was that she

Speaker 7 loved me so much and she realized that the person she loved

Speaker 7 only existed because of the union between my mother and my bloodfather.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 When she realized that,

Speaker 7 she suddenly felt immense gratitude to him.

Speaker 7 And so that is how we proceeded.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 I feel the same way. I mean, he's in my prayers, he's in my thoughts.
It turned out I was his only child,

Speaker 7 so he died young. So I, you know, I keep him with me.
My father

Speaker 7 will always be my father, and

Speaker 7 he is the one I aspired to

Speaker 7 be like.

Speaker 8 You write of him that my father lived in his own world.

Speaker 8 He left the new world to my mother. Yes.

Speaker 7 My father was

Speaker 7 well, he studied all the time. He read.
My father worked in a factory,

Speaker 7 but he was reading Socrates and Plato and Young and uophology and the Bible.

Speaker 7 He was hungry for knowledge, and

Speaker 7 I aspired to be like that. He was hoping after the world wars that

Speaker 7 we would have, man would be, would wake up, and the inhumanity, man's inhumanity to man, his favorite line from Robert Burns.

Speaker 7 He was hoping that

Speaker 7 that's

Speaker 7 what the new time would be. And he was so, you know, disgusted with

Speaker 7 the humanity. I mean,

Speaker 7 if anything, I'm glad he's not seeing our world now.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 my father loved Ralph Nader, always voted for him.

Speaker 8 Still very much with us, Ralph Nader.

Speaker 7 Yes, and a good friend.

Speaker 8 Part of the book, early on, is a kind of accounting for and a collection of the deep influences, almost talismans.

Speaker 8 First is the recording of Madame Butterfly, then a biography of Diego Rivera. Yes.
You read Arthur Rambeau, which is not the usual thing for somebody that young.

Speaker 8 And then, maybe most fatefully, your mother at a drugstore buys for less than a dollar a copy for you of Another Side of Bob Dylan, which is not the first Dylan album, but it's early on.

Speaker 8 It's a transitional album.

Speaker 7 I had heard of him, and I had listened to whatever I could hear on the radio, but I never had a record.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 just looking at him and that picture and and reading his liner notes, and I associated him so much

Speaker 7 with Rimbaud,

Speaker 7 a song like Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. Very Rimbaudian.
Many of his,

Speaker 7 even his face is

Speaker 7 very like the young Rimbaud. So, and he was alive.
Finally, I had somebody I couldn't. That's not unimportant.

Speaker 7 Well, I had so many, you know, you know, I loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Outcott and all the people I loved, you know, they were all long gone.

Speaker 7 And Rambeau, long gone, finally somebody in real time that I could fantasize about or follow or, you know, learn from.

Speaker 8 And he was alive and yet a little bit out of reach, too, which added to the allure. I remember being a fanatic on this subject.

Speaker 8 We've talked about this before, but so rarely would you hear his speaking voice.

Speaker 8 And once I remember listening to WPLJ, I think it was, or any WFM, and he was being interviewed by Mary Travers, and he was answering questions. And he was irritated and the usual things.

Speaker 8 But it was something it's very hard to explain now.

Speaker 7 Oh, I still remember

Speaker 7 I saw him in Philadelphia in like 65,

Speaker 7 and he introduced visions of Johanna

Speaker 7 before he recorded it.

Speaker 7 And I remember he came to the microphone, he said,

Speaker 7 this song is called

Speaker 7 Obviously Not a Freeze-Out.

Speaker 7 Obviously Not a Freeze-Out.

Speaker 7 The first words I hear from Bob Dylan, and I've never forgotten them. I can hear it in my, you know, it's just,

Speaker 7 it was amazing to hear him speak.

Speaker 8 So many artistic memoirs, including Dylan's Chronicles,

Speaker 8 have that moment where you arrive. You physically arrive.
In your case, the arrival at the gates of New York, and you write this, I stepped out of Board Authority bus terminal with my plaid suitcase.

Speaker 8 I love that, the plaid suitcase. My greatest desire at the time was to surrender as an artist.
What a word, surrender.

Speaker 8 And then you go on, perhaps I lacked the necessary skills, but I had the willingness to develop them, for I believed in the truth of my calling and was single-minded in my pursuit to find work.

Speaker 8 It had come to me as if struck with an ecstatic paralysis. And then the next paragraph, you're off to the races.
But when did you start to get the idea of this is what I could be?

Speaker 8 You start writing poems, and then you get the idea to be backed up by musicians while doing so at St. Mark's Church, an old church downtown where they have poetry readings.

Speaker 8 When does the penny start to drop? And this is the path I can pursue that will fulfill the vision of who I might be and what I want to say.

Speaker 7 It was a lot actually,

Speaker 7 because it wasn't my first pursuit, I wanted to be an artist.

Speaker 7 By then,

Speaker 7 I had a feeling that I really didn't have the necessary physical skills, that I was always going to be good at what I did.

Speaker 7 I was, you know, I felt that I had certain gifts, but

Speaker 7 I had really embraced being a writer.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 it was Sam Shepard who and I did. Sam Shepard.

Speaker 8 And you were to play together. Yes.

Speaker 7 But I had been to poetry readings and they seemed so boring to me.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 I didn't want to be boring. And I was talking to Sam, and he said, well, you know, you sing little songs like little blue.
We used to do little blue songs together.

Speaker 7 Like, why don't you get a guitar player and do a couple of songs?

Speaker 7 and I had just met Lenny Kay and he had said that he played some guitar so I recruited him on one poem to do a car crash you know he had like a really tiny little champ amp and electric guitar

Speaker 7 and he did like a car crash to one of my long poems but

Speaker 7 it caused quite a commotion That I didn't expect.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 the fact that we had an electric guitar in the church.

Speaker 8 This is at St. Mark's?

Speaker 7 Yeah, and a girl doing that

Speaker 7 got a lot of negativity, but also... It got negativity.
Both.

Speaker 8 How was that expressed?

Speaker 7 Well, desecration of the church.

Speaker 7 And also, you know, a little blasphemous poems, I suppose.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 7 I can't say to this day why it made such an impression on people. I mean, I was offered after that a record contract.
I was offered

Speaker 7 all kinds of things, and I thought it was really stupid. I thought stupid.
You know,

Speaker 7 all that attention over that, you know, I thought, no, I'm not going to get involved in all of that yet. I just thought it was an awful lot.

Speaker 7 And I wasn't prepared for it.

Speaker 7 I just didn't want to be boring, you know.

Speaker 8 You just didn't want to be boring at all.

Speaker 7 No, I didn't want to be boring.

Speaker 8 Well, let me ask you, one of your first utterances, you know, recorded utterances that, you know, I remember hearing this record, is Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

Speaker 8 And yet you were brought up in a highly

Speaker 8 religious or religiously inflected or infused household. Your mother became a Jehovah's Witness, if I remember.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 8 What was your relationship to God and Jesus and religion by the time you were...

Speaker 7 I mean, I was going to Bible school at two and a half I was asking questions about prayer I made my mother crazy asking her you know what is the soul what color is the soul will the soul come back if it goes you know

Speaker 7 goes away while I'm sleeping well and my mother finally sent me to Bible school

Speaker 7 and I had a very strong

Speaker 7 Bible education. My father read the Bible.
My father loved to argue with all if any religious person or any organization came to the door, he'd bring them in and usually like

Speaker 7 truthfully wipe them out because he knew more about the Bible than they did.

Speaker 7 And I was a Jehovah's Witness till I was 12 or 12 years old. But

Speaker 7 I felt at 12, I was grateful for all my education.

Speaker 7 But I felt that I was not a candidate for organized religion. But were you in rebellion toward it, you think? It wasn't rebellion.
I just

Speaker 7 didn't rebel. I just understood that

Speaker 7 it wasn't right for me.

Speaker 8 Did you become an atheist?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 No, I still love God.

Speaker 7 Even when I wrote,

Speaker 7 I mean, people would say, oh, when horses came out, you don't love Jesus. You don't believe in Jesus.
I said, I believe in him so much, he's the first word of my record.

Speaker 7 That was not against Jesus. It was really more my statement about organized religion with a lot of young bravado.
I wrote that poem in 1968

Speaker 7 and recorded it in 1975, but I had written it quite some time before.

Speaker 7 And not long after even I recorded that in studying Jesus in a different angle, not through religion,

Speaker 7 I came actually

Speaker 7 to deeply admire him. And

Speaker 7 I still study the New Testament with my sister, or actually the whole Bible with my sister, because she's a very devout witness. And we

Speaker 7 have Bible studies because I love to talk about and interpret or

Speaker 7 think about

Speaker 7 different things in the Bible. Also the language, I mean the Revelations was another influence on me

Speaker 7 aesthetically because of the language, the King James Version, you know, it's quite poetical.

Speaker 7 But I'm still the same way. I have my own relationship with God.
It never it might shift through the years.

Speaker 8 How would you describe that relationship?

Speaker 7 It's

Speaker 7 one of

Speaker 7 I trust that,

Speaker 7 basically I trust that God

Speaker 7 understands my heart, knows who I am, knows

Speaker 7 he knows my trespasses,

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 7 I never petition God. You don't.
Even with all

Speaker 7 even when Robert was sick, I never your friend Robert Maplethorpe.

Speaker 8 Yep.

Speaker 7 I prayed for him. I prayed for everyone.

Speaker 7 I pray for, you know,

Speaker 7 the hostages for the Palestinian people. I pray for everyone.

Speaker 7 I don't have, I'm not discriminating and praying for people, but I pray for their,

Speaker 7 just as I prayed for Robert, for their

Speaker 7 strengthening of their heart to endure. what they have to endure.

Speaker 8 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking with Patty Smith. We'll continue in a moment.

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Speaker 8 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with Patty Smith.

Speaker 8 This is a pretty big week for Patty Smith. Her debut album, Horses, came out exactly 50 years ago, November 10th, 1975.
An anniversary reissue has come out this year.

Speaker 8 And Smith has also just published the third of an extraordinary series of memoirs dealing with a pretty extraordinary life. The book is called Brett of Angels.

Speaker 8 The book arguably pivots in the mid-70s. It's not the whole of the book, but there's a kind of pivotal two things happen in the mid-70s.

Speaker 8 The first thing is that you record, and it's now remarkably, to my mind, the 50th anniversary of Horses, I think in November 10th.

Speaker 8 And some of these songs you still play, yeah, to this day.

Speaker 8 And then something personal happens. You meet the man who'd become your husband, and eventually

Speaker 8 you withdraw from that life that you were having

Speaker 8 as a rock star,

Speaker 8 as a public persona.

Speaker 8 Tell me about that falling in love and then this withdrawal, because

Speaker 8 it is

Speaker 8 in many ways the heart of the book and extraordinarily moving.

Speaker 7 Well, thank you. I mean, one of the reasons I...
wrote this book, and this book is really, you know, it's in the bread of Angels is really the idea of its gratitude or gestures of kindness. And

Speaker 7 I wanted these people to be remembered as I knew them, not as how they're, you know, speculated upon or written about. And I wanted Fred to be remembered as the man that I loved and shared, you know,

Speaker 7 albeit brief, but

Speaker 7 very condensed and

Speaker 7 wondrous time together.

Speaker 8 What's amazing, you encounter Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. You're on tour.
Yes.

Speaker 7 And even after

Speaker 8 we get to know him in this book, there's a degree to which

Speaker 8 he's hard to penetrate as a person for you.

Speaker 7 Well, he was very private. He was very private, and there was aspects that were impenetrable.
But, you know,

Speaker 7 that was part of

Speaker 7 that understanding

Speaker 7 or understanding that I'll never completely understand him was was part of the

Speaker 7 the mystical contract.

Speaker 7 But I

Speaker 7 I never thought of myself as getting married and have a family. Um but you know it was nineteen seventy six, March tenth, our first show in Detroit.
We were on the horses tour.

Speaker 7 We were briefly at a party thrown at us for us.

Speaker 7 I stopped in because I don't really like parties that much, so I didn't want to be there too long.

Speaker 7 But everyone was so nice, but then I wanted to leave. And I...
Just as I was about to leave, I saw him.

Speaker 7 He was standing there in a dark blue overcoat by a white radiator

Speaker 7 right at the door.

Speaker 7 And we looked at each other, and it was like in movies where everything stops, you know, and everybody dissipates, and it's only a second, but it feels like it could be several minutes.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 I knew instinctively, with all my being, that that was the fella I was going to marry.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 it, you know, we had, we developed a long distance relationship for a few years, and all that parting became increasingly difficult, sometimes months.

Speaker 7 And back then, you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have Zooms, you couldn't see the person, long-distance calls were really

Speaker 7 expensive.

Speaker 7 I remember gathering every piece of change in, I think it was Ireland, found a phone booth and filled the phone booth with like, you know, you know, so much change to talk to them for two minutes.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 finally, it was just too difficult and the conflict was difficult. And also I

Speaker 7 wasn't really growing as an artist. I wasn't really writing.
I neglected my notebooks. I wasn't studying.

Speaker 7 And finally, in 1980,

Speaker 7 exactly four years later, we did marry.

Speaker 8 You made a decision to stop. I threw it all away.
Love is all there is.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 7 it wasn't just for love.

Speaker 7 That was yet at the heart of it.

Speaker 7 But it was also for self-preservation.

Speaker 7 Because I could see my future and I could see that I would get bigger,

Speaker 7 most likely.

Speaker 7 I don't know what kind of music we'd produce, but because I didn't even know if I had more,

Speaker 7 you know, records in me or anything. I just,

Speaker 7 as a performer, we were so

Speaker 7 we were quite big in Europe,

Speaker 7 but I wasn't evolving at all. And I was getting,

Speaker 7 I think, more high-strung

Speaker 7 and just

Speaker 7 I wasn't happy.

Speaker 8 But you were not, as I understand it, you weren't

Speaker 8 self-destructive.

Speaker 7 Drugs were not your thing.

Speaker 7 No, I was never, I mean, I was such a sickly kid. I mean, my mother had to, I had to be nursed through bronchular pneumonia at birth and

Speaker 7 tuberculosis and scarlet fever and the pandemic flu of 1958. And then, you know, mononucleosis.

Speaker 7 I had so I was so plus all the measles monks chickenpox I had had to struggle so much to live and then when I came to New York

Speaker 7 and when Robert and I moved to the Chelsea in the 1969

Speaker 7 I saw a lot of great people destroying themselves and who never made it past 27

Speaker 7 or other people who did make it for a while but had so

Speaker 7 damaged themselves. And I never wanted to be like that.

Speaker 7 In fact,

Speaker 7 at the Chelsea, because I didn't do anything, I didn't even smoke pot, there was rumors for a while that I was a narcissist. Because I was

Speaker 7 a narcotics agent. I swear to you, and Robert even told me, he said, you know, some people are saying that

Speaker 7 you're a narc. We thought it was funny, but they were suspicious of me.

Speaker 8 So let's go to your time at home with Fred. How did you experience li after this t unbelievably tumultuous time, an exciting time?

Speaker 7 You're at home.

Speaker 8 And how did you live your life and how long did that

Speaker 8 last and your experience of kind of domestic happiness, if that's what it was?

Speaker 7 I missed my

Speaker 7 brother. I missed being on the I'm an East Coast person.

Speaker 7 I missed the ocean. I missed all the cafes.
cafes.

Speaker 7 I missed the camaraderie of my band.

Speaker 7 I miss traveling.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 because I'm very lucky, because I have other outlets of

Speaker 7 creative expression, I wasn't wanting. I wasn't suffering because I wasn't on stage.

Speaker 10 I didn't depend on

Speaker 7 adulation for my self-worth.

Speaker 7 So I didn't, those kind of things didn't come into play. One of the things I missed the most was cafes, just to be able to walk out my door and go to a cafe.

Speaker 8 This is something we share. You're also a coffee freak.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'd like my coffee.

Speaker 7 But I liked our life.

Speaker 10 And,

Speaker 7 you know, and we had Fred, like me, was always studying. You know,

Speaker 7 he studied to be a pilot.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 he got his pilot's license. He was studying navigation.

Speaker 7 He studied, you know,

Speaker 7 so we both love that aspect of learning.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 we wrote music at home.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 we're just,

Speaker 7 I don't know, I'm not domestically inclined. I wasn't the greatest housekeeper, but I'm good at laundry.
I did the laundry and I washed the diapers and

Speaker 7 my kids,

Speaker 7 I love my kids.

Speaker 8 What year did Fred die?

Speaker 7 The end of 94.

Speaker 8 You were left with just this gigantic

Speaker 8 loss and hole in your life.

Speaker 8 And what was your determination to do the next days and months?

Speaker 7 Well, I had two children. They were seven and twelve.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 I had

Speaker 7 and also I had the promise from my brother when he died that he would help me raise the kids.

Speaker 7 And just unexpectedly, he had a massive stroke a month later and died at 42.

Speaker 7 So it wasn't just the loss of Fred that I had to

Speaker 7 deal with. It was the loss of my brother Todd.

Speaker 7 Did you think you could come back from all of that? Well, I had to. A mother.

Speaker 8 You came back to music with a record called Gone Again. Yes.

Speaker 8 What did that moment feel like for you?

Speaker 7 It was very painful because

Speaker 7 Fred and I had worked on a record toward the end of his life.

Speaker 7 He wanted to call it Going West.

Speaker 7 We did a lot of work on the record,

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 7 I had to take that work

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 7 sort of transform it and write new work

Speaker 7 for a new record. And it was very necessary because we had lived so frugally and simply,

Speaker 7 and there were many doctor bills and all kinds of things, and

Speaker 7 I was really obliged to return to work.

Speaker 7 And of course, I have very good friends that all help me

Speaker 7 get my feet back on the ground.

Speaker 7 And even though, yes, it was wonderful to record with them,

Speaker 7 was great.

Speaker 7 But I think I said in the book,

Speaker 7 I had to take the photographs without Robert, play music without Richard Soule, my beloved pianist who also had a died of heart failure at 37, without my brother at the helm, without Fred by my side.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 it was not,

Speaker 7 it was something that I had to navigate, and I was very lucky to have, you know, all kinds of people helped with that record. I got through it with the help of friends, and,

Speaker 7 you know, eventually

Speaker 7 in returning, the idea of returning, performing was really daunting.

Speaker 7 But it was Alan Ginsburg, another friend who

Speaker 7 kept entreating me to go back to public life and go back on stage.

Speaker 7 And I believe it was Alan that talked to Bob Dylan. And then Bob Dylan offered us a East Coast tour.
And it was my first tour in 16 years.

Speaker 8 Patty, there's a remarkable passage that opens the last chapter, I believe. I wonder if you could read that for us.

Speaker 7 For a long time, I maintained a vestige of innocence, a feathery wisp adrift somewhere inside me, affording me a generous measure of enthusiasm, tempering loss and disappointment.

Speaker 7 I held a constancy with my youthful calling, a blood vine circling the ankle of a twelve-year-old girl, a messenger attaching his wing and bruising her heel.

Speaker 7 I felt blessed with the aspiration to produce worthy work.

Speaker 7 But recently I've sensed a pulling away, macaulal droplets tapping my skull as I fitfully seek sleep, my ears press against the pillow, a repeating phrase pulsating.

Speaker 7 We who no longer believe.

Speaker 7 When did I write that? And why?

Speaker 7 It disturbs me. Have I really felt that for more than a few sullen moments?

Speaker 8 Patty, tell me about that feeling of no longer believing.

Speaker 7 It still shocks me that I even reading it now because I haven't.

Speaker 7 I was just,

Speaker 7 I actually,

Speaker 7 if I really deeply think about it, think it's part of the aging process and

Speaker 7 going through so much loss, so much experience, and maybe fatigue,

Speaker 7 almost losing motivation, like, why am I creating?

Speaker 7 What is the point?

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 it's trying trying to pray.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 I've always had a one-to-one relationship with God,

Speaker 7 but after each person died, Robert and Fred and

Speaker 7 my brother, my father, my mother, I sometimes wondered, who am I praying to?

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 7 I sometimes just didn't know.

Speaker 7 Now I think it doesn't matter. Prayer is always beautiful.

Speaker 7 But I just,

Speaker 7 I think for a while I felt disconnected with everything.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 when I wrote that,

Speaker 7 it did disturb me. It disturbs me still because

Speaker 7 I'm filled with belief. I believe in so many things.
I believe, as I wrote in the book, I believe in belief.

Speaker 7 I'll believe in someone else's belief wholeheartedly. But my belief does not

Speaker 7 cancel out another person's belief.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 I believe there are many, many

Speaker 7 beautiful truths. Not many evil truths.
There's just one evil truth, but many beautiful truths.

Speaker 8 Do you find it harder

Speaker 8 of late because of what's happening in the public world to sustain that?

Speaker 7 I find it very difficult.

Speaker 7 You know, I have a substack and I tell the people freely sometimes. I find it very hard sometimes to post and tell them funny stories or read them Uncle Wiggily or just go into some

Speaker 7 abstract mode. I sometimes feel strange posting something on Instagram because

Speaker 7 I have a sense of frivolity in the face of so much suffering, and I can't get the suffering of the people out of my mind. It wakes me up in the middle of the night.
It's on my mind when I wake.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 I still feel that, you know, I'm 78 years old.

Speaker 7 I have still much work to do. I have to do my work.
I'm a mother. I have to,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 be there. I have three kids.
I have to be there for them. I have to,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 well, I have to celebrate the life I've been given.

Speaker 8 What gives you joy now?

Speaker 7 What gives me joy is when my kids seem good.

Speaker 7 That's one of my great joys. It gives me joy when I write something and I think it's good.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 in fact, I was writing all morning and I, you know, I've been struggling a bit and I wrote all morning. And when I finished, I went, oh, good work.

Speaker 7 Almost out loud to myself.

Speaker 8 Well, I hope you feel that way about Bread Evangelists because it brought me enormous, enormous joy.

Speaker 7 Oh, David, thank you. Well, it's just,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 I like to see people happy, or I like to do do something. It's one of the great joys still of performing, you know, to see people, you know, spirited and full of energy and hopeful.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 7 if it's helpful or inspires people,

Speaker 7 you know, in their own struggles, that'll make me happy too.

Speaker 8 Patty Smith, thank you so much.

Speaker 7 Thanks, David.

Speaker 8 Bread of Angels is the new book by Patty Smith, and you can read a beautiful excerpt from it at newyorker.com. It's called Art Rats in New York City.

Speaker 8 You can of course subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 6 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 7 Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

Speaker 12 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

Speaker 6 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 14 Join Vanguard for a moment of meditation.

Speaker 7 Take a deep breath.

Speaker 14 Picture yourself reaching your financial goals.

Speaker 7 Feel that freedom.

Speaker 14 Visit vanguard.com/slash investinginyou to learn more. All investing is subject to risk.

Speaker 13 Hey, welcome into Walgreens.

Speaker 5 Hi there. Hey.

Speaker 15 All right, hon. I'll grab the gift wrap, cards, and oh, those stuffed animals the girls want.

Speaker 8 Great. And I'll grab the string lights and some.

Speaker 8 How about I grab some cough drops? This is not just a quick trip to Walgreens.

Speaker 13 I'm fine, honey.

Speaker 8 Well, just in case, you know what they say: tis the season. This is Help Staying Healthy Through the Holidays.

Speaker 7 Walgreens.