“VOICES. VOICES MESMERIZE”
Patti Smith's Year Of The Monkey
Patti Smith, an icon of the 1970s New York punk rock movement, is a writer, performer and visual artist. She has released 12 albums and her first, Horses, was recognized by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 albums of all time. Smith, also known as a “poet laureate,” just released her latest memoir, Year of the Monkey. “I began writing it on New Year’s Day, 2016 in cafes, trains and strange motels by the sea, with no particular design, until page by page it became a book,” Smith wrote on her Instagram account. “I’m very excited to have new work to report.”
Year of the Monkey begins after her New Year’s Eve Concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. It was past midnight when Smith arrived in front of the Dream Hotel in Santa Cruz, California. The plan was to have New Year’s Day lunch with her friend, songwriter Sandy Pearlman. That never happened. He had a cerebral hemorrhage before the band’s run at the Fillmore and was hospitalized in a coma. Smith embarks on a solitary wandering down the coast of California, riding with strangers and eating in diners. One leg of the trip was with a couple who told her there would be no talking. They left her at a gas station for breaking their cardinal rule. Her trip to San Diego continued with “Cammy” in a Lexus filled with boxes marked “Pickling” and “Avon” plus a trunk full of mason jars.
In February 2016, a lunar year begins, bringing on the challenges of sorrow, loss, aging and a shift in America’s political landscape. Smith traveled through California, Arizona and Kentucky and illustrated the journey with her own Polaroids. During this cross country journey, Sandy Pearlman’s health deteriorated and her long-time friend, actor and playwright Sam Shepard was losing his battle with ALS. Smith’s adventure was a poetic blend of her imagination and reality. As a stranger told her, “Anything is possible. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.”
Smith’s 2010 memoir, Just Kids, reflected on her relationship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Her 2015 M Train focused on her late husband and family life. Year of the Monkey, Smith explained in a Billboard interview, was a different way of writing about her grief, “With Robert, I was looking back: He died in 1989, and the book didn’t come out until 2010. It was written about 1967 on, so I was really looking deep into past tense. M Train went in and out of present tense into a lot about my husband, a lot about the ‘80s. But this book, my challenge to myself was try to keep it in time. Sometimes I did regress backwards to explain this and that. I was not anticipating that I was going to have to write about the death of one friend in time, and then the struggles of one of my closest people, Sam, also in time. It was different in that way.”
At 72, Smith has a lifetime of achievements and has wisdom and wit. While 2016 was a surreal and sad year for her, Smith navigates life with hope. She notes in the book’s epilogue, “This is what I know. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.”
