Death-Performances in Patti Smith’s Memoir (M Train, 2015)

Abstract

Patti Smith’s memoir M Train, published in 2015, focuses on the individual and collective traumatic experience of loss. The main purpose of her memoir is a mourning-process through traveling, pilgrimage, and writing. Not only the physical venues mentioned can be considered as stations of this process, but also the intertextual spaces as an opportunity to meet the deceased. The narrator reads and writes herself into these texts, which are the fictive intermedial meeting points in her autobiography. Smith’s reflection on the work, “I wrote to give myself something to read,” is the key to understanding Smith’s approach to the genre. M Train's stations are made of various documents of adventures, (self)reflections, dreams, photos of the heroin who found herself trapped in her own fiction.