M Train

A meditation on loss, coffee, detective shows, and the consolation of small rituals. M Train is Patti Smith’s second memoir, looser and more dreamlike than Just Kids, structured around the cafes she has frequented around the world and the journeys she has taken to visit the graves of writers she loves.

Why Read This

If Just Kids is about becoming an artist, M Train is about being one in the long middle of life. Smith writes about the death of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, about hurricanes destroying her beach house, about traveling to the homes of Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath. The book drifts between memory and present tense, illustrated with her own Polaroid photographs.

The prose is more fragmentary than in Just Kids, more associative, more willing to follow a thought wherever it leads. Some readers prefer this book precisely because it feels less shaped, more like being inside a mind that never stops noticing.

What to Expect

A quiet, meditative book that resists summary. There is no single narrative arc. Instead, there are episodes, pilgrimages, and reflections that accumulate into a portrait of a life shaped by reading, writing, and attentive solitude. Best read slowly, a chapter at a time.