Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith (2019)

In her third memoir, Punk poet Patti Smith selects moments from 2016, an election year and the Year of the Monkey.

Memoir Review: Year of the Monkey, as with her two previous memoirs, Just Kids and M Train, remembers lost friends and lovers. Just as she eulogized Robert Mapplethorpe and her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith in those books, here she focuses on playwright Sam Shepard and writer Sandy Pearlman. Lamenting those passed is a theme Patti Smith has developed as far back as her memorable first album, Horses (1975), which included the song "Elegie" dedicated to Jimi Hendrix ("my head is aching as I dream and breathe"). Year of the Monkey relates occasional events from 2016 and as in her previous works (including the short book Devotion in the "Why I Write" series) she expands on her belief in the power of objects, memory, ritual, sympathetic magic, the importance of people she's known, places she's been, her deep emotional reactions, and gives wide latitude to whimsy and the creativity latent in the world. Her reflections on books she's read (Roberto Bolano's 2666; Meditations by Marcus Aurelius) add interest. As 2016 was an election year in the U.S., Year of the Monkey incorporates a fair share of Trump bashing, also. Compared to the books mentioned above, this one has the smallest palette and is the most self-indulgent (why constantly describe her unappetizing breakfasts) and the most fictionalized, but at age 70 perhaps she's earned that right and it's easy enough for the reader to indulge her in this short memoir. Even as Patti Smith laments "the dried-up-poet syndrome," her poetic soul is never far from the surface.  [3★]