Patti Smith Offers New Details on Next Book

The follow-up to Patti Smith’s award-winning 2010 memoir Just Kids will broaden her focus to music and her life with Fred “Sonic” Smith, the MC5 guitarist and her late husband, the singer told Billboard. Just Kids, an account of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethrope, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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The new book, one of several Smith says she’s working on, “is in more of the Just Kids vein and even in the similar time period, but shifts more to family, Fred, music,” Smith said. “So it’s a different perspective. Just Kids was very focused on Robert and my relationship with Robert and wanting to be an artist, and the next book will be more, perhaps, music-based.”

It won’t, however, be a standard tell-all confessional. “I don’t have a big rock & roll lifestyle, a sex, drugs and rock & roll story to tell,” Smith said. “I think I have maybe a better story. Through rock & roll I traveled the world, worked with my late brother [Todd] and, best of all, that’s how I met Fred. It changed my life in many unexpected ways, so I have my story to tell.”

The rocker said that writing the book will be part of “a year of work” in 2013, joking, “I just reached Social Security age, but I’m far from retiring.” 

Smith will also continue to mount her “Solo Camera” photo exhibition at museums, tour behind this year’s Banga and, maybe, release her cover of the Spencer Williams song “I Ain’t Got Nobody” that she recorded for the season finale of Boardwalk Empire.