Year of the Monkey

Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Riveting, elegant, humorous—this "picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones” (The New York Times) is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times. Illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids. Following a run of new year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith—inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing—this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, “Anything is possible. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world. Including a new chapter, "Epilogue of an Epilogue," and ten new photos, Year of the Monkey “reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source” (Los Angeles Times).