Jersey Girl

An interviewer once asked Patti Smith whether she’d always planned on becoming a rock musician, and she responded with a characteristically impassioned rant against labels. “Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that?” she said. “I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then they called me a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.” This was in 2008, by which point Smith had produced 10 records, almost as many poetry collections, a play, and a few books of photography and visual art. Two years later, she released the National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, and for a while it was tempting to think of her as a rock poet who dabbled in autobiography. But more books have since followed — there are about five prose memoirs in total now, depending on whether you include the 90-odd page Devotion — signaling something less like a side project than a complete creative rebirth.