Patti Smith, renowned singer-songwriter has said her series of autobiographical books began when she made a promise to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe just hours before his death.
The 79-year-old Because the Night singer was speaking about her latest book, Bread of Angels, with popstar Dua Lipa at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Sunday as part of an event for the London Literature Festival.
Lipa, who was curating the festival, asked Smith if she knew she wanted to write more autobiographical books when she wrote her first, Just Kids, which was released in 2010.
The New Jersey-born singer replied, “Well, after I wrote Just Kids, because Robert asked me to write it hours before he died, I promised him I would.”
Patti continued, “I didn’t know anything about writing a memoir or non-fiction. I liked to write poems and fairy tales, and it was so much responsibility and took me so long.”
“I swore I’d never write another memoir, but then… truthfully, I had a dream,” she revealed, adding, “I had a dream about this book, that a messenger came to my house with a white book, and I opened it up, and it was a book that I had written, and it had all the stages of my life.”
“And they were broken down through dresses: a childhood dress, a dress that Robert gave me, which I called my art dress, a dress that my brother bought me, which was my rock and roll dress, and then my wedding dress that my husband (the late MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith) gave me,” Patti further mentioned.
“And I realised that all the men, including my uncle who had bought me my childhood dress, had died,” she said of her epiphany.
Patti stated, “And in writing… if I wrote about these dresses, I would be writing about them, my childhood, my evolution as an artist, and all the things in the world of my public life, and then marriage, and then eventual loss and starting life again, and it seems so daunting.”
“But I felt… there was a reason that I dreamed that, and I found it was because it was that all those
people were calling, ‘Don’t forget us, write our little story too’, and so that’s what I did,” she said of her decision to write memoirs.
It is pertinent to mention that, Robert Mapplethorpe, who Patti Smith credited, died due to complications from HIV/AIDS in Boston, Massachusetts, in March 1989.
