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Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith: book review



Year of the Monkey (2019) is another memoir by American musician and author Patti Smith, following her most memorable 2010 autobiography Just Kids.

Just Kids focused predominantly on her early years in the 1970s and her relationship with artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Year of theMonkey is very different.

This memoir focuses on dreams as she walks the coastline of Santa Cruz In California alone in preparation for a year of wandering. “Our dreams are a second life,” she says. It is 2016, the Year of the Monkey, and Patti Smith will be seventy years old. “Anything is possible … After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.”

She dreams of Uluru—Ayers Rock—in the middle of Australia: “It’s the dream capital of the world.” She dreams of people and places. She dreams of Zurich and the grave of James Joyce—and unicorns. Aiding her dreams are old photographs, reliving past memories. 

In this transformative year, Smith blends dreams with reality as she takes a private, contemplative review of her life – and writes about it. Dreaming, recollecting dreams, and putting dreams and thoughts on paper are all cathartic. 

Sometimes she dreams a lot, sometimes she dreams little. Sometimes she writes a lot, sometimes she writes little. She lets life dictate the pace, unfettered by others. She walks from California to the Arizona Desert to Kentucky—she drifts. The idea is not to travel far, but to dream far. Far into her past and far into her future.

In doing so, she prepares herself for the next decade of her life. This preparation is calm and calming. Slow paced. “In my travel, I disconnect from the news, reread Allen’s poems …”

“A lot of rough things happened” in 2016, personally and globally. This is all part of her dreaming and walking journey. 

This interesting memoir is a brief look into the thoughts of Patti Smith in one year of her life, as she prepares for her future. She is self-reflective in the Year of the Monkey. Her mother was born in 1920, which is also the Year of the Monkey, which she finds coincidental and curative. Yes, definitely, anything is possible even after the Year of the Monkey.







MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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