Looking from my page to the restaurant before me, I knew I found the right place. During a silent book club in the Lower East Side, I began reading “M Train” by Patti Smith. I had read her debut memoir, “Just Kids,” three years prior and absolutely loved it. It made me fall in love with New York — the good and the bad — before even knowing I would be applying to schools here. Ever since, it’s been a favorite of mine, confidently residing untouched on my Goodreads “favorites” shelf. However, I saw “M Train” after moving here, and I knew I had to get it. In hindsight, with my extensive “To-Be-Read” or TBR list, I probably shouldn’t have gotten a new book, but I am so glad I did. If I had not picked it up, I would not be standing face to face with a restaurant/café I have never been to before. Which sounds insignificant — there are thousands of restaurants and cafés I have never been to before. But the inspiration it gives makes it a destination not to be ignored.
Smith grew up in New Jersey until she moved to Manhattan in 1967 and lived with iconic photographer Robert Maplethorpe. She found solace in her poetry in the underground art scene, and her writing began to thrive. “Just Kids” revolves around this transformative time of her emerging into New York City — “No one expected me. Everything awaited me.” — as well as her tumultuous yet beautiful relationship with Maplethorpe. I was given this book as a gift for Christmas but didn’t read it until New Year’s, which was a great decision on my part. I started 2022 with quotes like, “Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, an inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
I remember reading this and thinking, how does someone write this?
Her prose is so pure, real and raw that I saw so much of my own ambition and desire within it. Later that year I went to Chicago, about six hours away from my hometown, and saw her name in a small bookstore along the pier. It was “Woolgathering,” a collection of her poems. I spent the cash I had in my pocket from babysitting on a book instead of dessert that night, but I knew I would enjoy it just as much. The selected poems dive deep into the lives of “cloud dwellers,” such as herself, among traditional noble vocations. Her writing is tender and harsh, writing from the perspective of a child and a mother, and she intertwines her childhood memories to the essence of her creative pursuits: “I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I’d be good. I’d dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.”
Since then I’ve held onto the inspiration her work has given me, which in turn compelled me to pick up “M Train” — named after a subway — when I moved to New York. Having Smith’s collection of traveling essays by my side while exploring the ups and downs of setting transition has completely transformed my outlook on everything. She explains more of her personal background while traveling and her current living style in New York while exploring different restaurants and, you guessed it, cafés.
The café I stood in front of with “M Train” tucked underneath my arm, also the map I used, sprawled out my future vocational possibilities on a silver platter. I sat near the booth where she described herself tucked into and began to read the rest of the book. Once I finished, I wrote a quick Goodreads review, “The first chapter, slipping between dreams and reality, already had my jaw on the floor. With most books I read and like, I tell people they should read them. With this one, I don’t mind. I don’t care. Right now, sitting in a café brimming with creativity and inspiration, I am immersed in a book that feels tailored to me. Her tangents and dreamscapes and adventures and quirks are remarkably described. I don’t need anyone else to read this because it feels like Smith is reading it to me.”
So whether or not you read “Just Kids,” “Woolgathering” or “M Train,” know that everywhere you go in this beautiful city opens itself up to you in unimaginable and surprising ways. If you do read these books, specifically “M Train,” I highly recommend visiting some of the restaurants and cafés she goes to. I think that day I indulged in six shots of espresso.
“Time passes and with it certain sensations. Yet once in a while the magic of the field and all that happened there surfaces.”
