Welcome to Book Talk, where we help you find new fuel for your bookish obsession. While you might not find these authors while scrolling short-form content online, you will find their work to be significant, impactful, and, hopefully, something you reach for time and again. Happy reading!
Patti Smith is likely the most famous author we’ll look at in this series, but it’s only because her work is so impactful. At 78-years-old, Smith has really lived: from beat poet to songwriter to public speaker, Smith has travelled the world, writing songs and stories. She also won the National Book Award for non-fiction for Just Kids (2010), co-wrote a song with Bruce Springsteen, and, on Bob Dylan’s behalf, accepted the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. According to Goodreads, she has also had a hand in dozens of books to this date. Talk about star power!
But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to celebrate her writing, and luckily for us, her breadth of experience has, in recent years, been distilled into multiple memoirs: meandering, personal entries that highlight not only Smith’s way with words, but give the reader a glimpse into the mind of someone who’s clearly experienced a lot more than most of us ever will. Beyond this, she’s also an avid photographer, which we’re able to see in A Book of Days (2022), a collection of 365 polaroids collected over the span of a year; with this, a line or two to capture the essence of the day.
But let’s rewind to early 2020. My love for Smith started on a snowy January day, when I found Year of the Monkey (2019) while wandering the public library. I’m a huge sucker for creative nonfiction that lets us open the little door into the writer’s mind — especially if it comes in the form of diary entries — and so by the end of the first page, I was hooked.
Unsurprisingly, the same pattern followed for the rest of her books I picked up. I read them voraciously, finding tiny links between Smith’s experience and my own that, by the time I’d finished all her books that were in the library’s collection, I felt a distinct connection to her. That’s just it: she’s famous; she’s travelled the world; she’s performed in front of thousands of people. And still she writes in a way that anyone reading her work will feel seen, and find themselves within her writing. That, I think, is the mark of a strong writer — one who will be remembered long after they’re gone.
Though we may attribute her wisdom to her age, I’d like to think she’s been wise her whole life — the way she writes makes me think so, at least. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite of her quotes, one that I return to again and again:
“We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.”
Happy reading!
