Patti Smith Announces New Memoir Year of the Monkey, Due in September

Patti Smith took to Instagram Thursday to announce she will release a new memoir later this summer titled Year of the Monkey.

A blend of fact and fiction, the memoir will follow Smith embarking on a journey of solitary wandering in 2016, a year that “evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America,” the book’s description reads.

The acclaimed musician and visual artist’s follow up to 2015’s M Train (and 2010’s National Book Award-winning Just Kids), Smith wrote that the bare bones of the memoir began on New Year’s Day in 2016, after which she penned it in “cafes, trains and strange motels by the sea” until “page by page it became a book.”

Smith’s writing will be accompanied by her signature Polaroids.

Smith released her 11th studio album Banga in 2012, and more recently announced she will be performing at Chicago’s Riot Fest in September. Earlier this month, Just Kids was named the pick for 2019’s inaugural “One Book, One New York” program—New York City’s citywide book club.

Year of the Monkey is set to release Sept. 24 via Penguin Random House, and you can preorder a copy of the book here.

Check out the cover of Year of the Monkey below via Smith’s Instagram post and revisit her 1976 performance of “Birdland” from the Paste archives further down.