 First edition | |
| Author | Patti Smith |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Patti Smith |
| Subject | Memoir |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Audio |
Publication date | 2015 |
| Media type | Print / Audio |
| Pages | 253 |
| ISBN | 978-1-101-87510-0 (Hardcover) |
| 782.4216092 | |
| LC Class | ML420.S672 |
M Train is a 2015 memoir written by Patti Smith. Smith's audiobook recording of M Train earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.
M Train is Smith's second memoir, [1] following the 2010 National Book Award-winning Just Kids . [2] While Just Kids recounts Smith's early life, the beginning of her career and particularly her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, [3] M Train focuses on a later portion of her life, the period since the release of her debut album Horses in 1975. [2] The memoir particularly recounts the personal losses that marked the forty-year span between Horses and M Train, including the deaths of Mapplethorpe in 1989, of AIDS; Smith's husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, in 1994 at 45, of heart failure; [4] and Smith's brother Todd a month later, of a stroke. [5]
The book also discusses the 16 years in this period during which Smith was not performing; instead, living in Detroit with her husband and two children, she spent early mornings writing stories before her family awoke. [6] The title, M Train, referring to this imaginative work, invokes a "mind train" that "goes to any station it wants." [6]
M Train received strongly favorable reviews. In The New York Times , book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book "achingly beautiful" with "lyrical and radiantly pictorial" prose. [5] In The Washington Post, novelist Elizabeth Hand described the book as being as "perceptive and beautifully written as its predecessor" Just Kids. [2] In one mild dissent, novelist Charles Finch wrote in the Chicago Tribune that M Train "didn't change my life" but "it's also easy to see why so many readers say that it has," noting it shares Just Kids' "gangly but lovely writing, the same resolute faith in the consolations of art, the same odd flashes of humor, the same rawness to memory and experience...it's obvious why some readers find a deep, deep correspondence to their own inner lives in [Smith's] work." [7]
M Train was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. [8]
Patricia Lee Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author whose 1975 debut album Horses made her an influential member of the New York City-based punk rock movement. Smith has fused rock and poetry in her work. In 1978, her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached 13th on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and fifth on the UK Singles Chart.
Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released by Arista Records on November 10, 1975. A fixture of the mid-1970s underground rock music scene in New York City, Smith signed to Arista in 1975 and recorded Horses with her band at Electric Lady Studios in August and September of that year. She enlisted former Velvet Underground member John Cale to produce the album.
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Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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My Beloved World is a memoir written by Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the United States Supreme Court, about her childhood, education, and life through 1992.
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Mapplethorpe is a 2018 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ondi Timoner about the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Shooting began on July 11, 2017 in New York and lasted only 19 days. It premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.