Our own Neda Ulaby got to have coffee with Patti Smith and talk about her new memoir, M Train. (ARE WE DYING OF ENVY? JUST A LITTLE.)

“Her last memoir, Just Kids, from 2010, chronicled her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe before he became known as one of the best and most provocative photographers of the 20th century and before she became, well, a rock goddess,.” Neda reports. 

Just Kids won a National Book Award. It spent 42 weeks on the bestseller lists. Smith spent years crafting it, after promising Mapplethorpe, who was then dying of AIDS, that she’d write about him.

M Train is a very different project, impressionistic and digressive.

“It’s like a mental train, a train of thought,” Smith says over coffee at New York’s Whynot Coffee. “It’s a mystery train. I just hopped on the train and see where I went every day.”

Find Neda’s full story here (and Patti Smith’s 2010 interview with Morning Edition about Just Kids here).

– Petra