Mesmerizing ... Her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes ... Losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.
If Bread of Angels lacks the strong coming-to-New York plot line of Just Kids, it feels more intimate than either of its predecessors, which are both graced and obscured by Smith’s enigmatic writing style ... [A] greater degree of openness ... Isn’t perfect. There’s a structural awkwardness about the way Smith has to leapfrog over those early New York years...lest she repeat herself. But those of us who love Smith — and we are legion — don’t love her because she or her art is perfect. We love her because of her aura of rough authenticity, her earnestness, her seer’s way with words and her occasional snarl.
Embedded in the new text are enlightening, full-bodied treatments of her girlhood ... As she describes it with prosaic eloquence, her decade tantamount to exile was a critical period of transition for her as an artist ... The book sounds like her songs: spiky, intuitive, more than a little showoffy. The rest of the book is more relaxed, more reflective. As smart and vivid as Just Kids, it’s more mature: just older.
Smith digs deeply and with care and considerable skill, bringing readers deeply into her childhood ... If you have followed Smith’s work for any period of time, you will already know some — but not all — of these stories, connections, and intersections. But now she is telling them in one place, collecting them in order to connect the dots more explicitly ... But there is also a reward here in these stories for the faithful that have always been paying attention, the callbacks to things already known and stories already told ... Plenty of new stories ... he book is not unnecessarily maudlin but rather sharply present, which is also simply an accurate descriptor for much of Smith’s life and work.
There is a sort of clarity and calm in the writing, a tone perfectly balanced between coolness and passion ... Smith’s legion of fans will treasure this lucid and likable self-reflection from one of the greatest living artists of our time.
Surprises don’t feel crucial to a work that builds its world as much through narrative voice as its description of events. That voice can take some getting used to. Oddly formal, even archaic, in tone, at times unrestrained if not undisciplined, Smith’s literary mind is a wild mare. It can occasionally feel repetitive or self‑indulgent. But once you settle in, it casts a potent spell ... Elegant.
A more comprehensive version of her life story, running all the way through to the present. That means it has a problem of overlap: a lot of the juiciest years of her life are the ones she spent immersed in bohemian New York, which were covered in Just Kids ... There’s an odd lack of emotional weight to parts of Smith’s story that you might imagine would hit the hardest ... Disarming as this is, there’s something refreshing about a writer refusing to perform the expected varieties of trauma ... This reserve also marks a contrast with Smith’s usual mode in Bread of Angels, which is exhaustingly florid ... Her greatest creation — the idea of what an artist should be — will live on for decades yet. Even if it is a bit annoying.
