Patti Smith announces new memoir ‘Bread of Angels’
Patti Smith has shared details of her new memoir, Bread of Angels, which will be published on November 4th, 2025.
Smith made the announcement on Instagram alongside an image of the musician with her parents as a young adult, writing, “This is with my mother and father who inspired much of my next book Bread of Angels. The memoir, a bright and dark dance of life, will be published on November 4th, by Random House.”
Bread of Angels is Smith’s third memoir after Just Kids in 2010 and M Train in 2015. Her first book focuses primarily on her relationship with the late Robert Mapplethorpe and documents the early years of her career in New York City. It became a New York Times bestseller and also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Meanwhile, M Train tells the story of Smith’s later years following the huge success of her album Horses in 1975 and the 40 years that came after which was tragically punctuated by the losses of her husband, brother and Mapplethorpe.
The synopsis for Bread of Angels reads: “The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.”
It continues: “As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again—the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.”
Later this year, Smith will spend time on the road celebrating the 50th anniversary of her seminal debut album, Horses.
The legendary artist will perform two shows at the London Palladium on October 12th and 13th, with shows in Dublin, Madrid, Bergamo, Brussels, Oslo and Paris rounding out the European leg of the tour. Her US tour will be stopping in Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia.
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