Patti Smith Says Her New Memoir Cover, Shot by Robert Mapplethorpe, Captures “a Deeply Transitional Moment”

In Just Kids, her gorgeous and heartbreaking 2010 memoir, Patti Smith fulfilled a promise to her indispensable friend and artistic coconspirator Robert Mapplethorpe that she would tell the pioneering photographer’s story, one that ended far too soon, with Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989. Smith’s early years were a major part of Just Kids too, but there was a great deal she left out, and an enormous amount that Smith has done in the 15 years since the book appeared.

This November, she continues the tale of her singular creative life with Bread of Angels (Random House). The book goes deep into Smith’s relationship with her parents while growing up in South Jersey, her marriage to MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, the profound pain of losing him to heart failure at the age of 46, and how she found her way back to writing and performing again. That creative process has now produced 12 books, hundreds of paintings, poems, photographs, vivid Instagram posts, and 11 albums, including the epochal Horses, which turns 50 years old this year—a milestone she will celebrate this fall with a short tour performing its songs.

Last January, the 78-year-old Smith collapsed on stage during an event in Brazil, a scare she attributed to migraine-related dizziness. Magic and loss have always braided through her work, and those themes seem especially strong at the moment, as Smith prepares to revisit some of her classic old songs while sending a new book about her life out into the world. Now, exclusively to Vanity Fair, Smith is revealing the cover of Bread Of Angels.

“Robert Mapplethorpe took this photograph at a deeply transitional moment. It was between the end of my public life as a performer and the beginning of my time in Detroit with my one true love, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. Robert had taken an image with doves for the cover of the album Wave,” Smith explains. “Afterwards, I asked him to take another that would reflect the sentiment of the song ‘Dancing Barefoot,’ a love song for Fred and a farewell to the people. This is the photograph he took.”