Year of the Monkey

Starred review from July 22, 2019
As she wanders between waking and dreaming in a year filled with the death of a close friend and the political turmoil of the 2016 election, musician and National Book Award–winner Smith (Just Kids) contemplates dreams and reality in this luminous collection of anecdotes and photos. In light of her 70th birthday, Smith writes lyrically on various subjects: she describes Allen Ginsberg’s poetry—which she carries along her travels­—as an “expansive hydrogen bomb, containing all the nuances of his voice.” On the “terrible soap opera called the American election,” she declares that “the bully bellowed. Silence ruled... All hail our American apathy, all hail the twisted wisdom of the Electoral College.” Watching a Belinda Carlisle video, she’s caught up in Carlisle’s infectious beat, and she imagines a “nonviolent hubris spreading across the land.” At one point, Smith learns from a stranger that, in dreams, “equations are solved in an entirely unique way, laundry stiffens in the wind, and our dead mothers appear with their backs turned.” Smith discovers that her most meaningful insights come from her vivid dreams, and she feels a palpable melancholia over having to wake up from them. Smith casts a mesmerizing spell with exquisite prose. Agent: Betsy Lerner: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary.

Starred review from July 15, 2019
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground. In terms of the calendar, Smith's latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would "have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead"; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality--no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person's spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, "I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously." She refers to herself as the "poet detective," and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. "I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges," she writes, "the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost." A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.

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August 16, 2019

The year 2016 was one of profound change. Between the deaths of numerous pop culture icons and the U.S. presidential election, it felt to many as though we were entering a whole new sense of reality. Similarly, for musician and author Smith (Just Kids), these events and her own personal losses were forming a new reality all its own. This memoir of that surreal year moves among events in Smith's life, dreamlike conversations with the dead, explorations of the past, and journeys with imaginary companions. Smith's gift for memoir, a natural extension of her work as a lyricist and poet, is once again apparent. Whether describing great works of art or her breakfast, Smith's straightforward use of language to evoke a mood or place make her flights in and out of dream states seamless. There is nothing pretentious or condescending about her writing, despite the literary and artistic allusions. Her words are for anyone. VERDICT Fans of Smith's extensive body of work and those who enjoy well-crafted personal narratives will find much to love in this brief and vibrant book.--Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
It was a year of disruption, wandering, loss, disorienting dreams, and surreal visions. This year of the monkey' on the Chinese zodiac was also the year Smith turned 70 and a trickster election hurled the country into a dark looking-glass realm. In her third memoir, National Book Award winner Smith writes with fresh lucidity, arch wit, bittersweet wonder, and stoic sorrow, shifting in tone from lyrical to hallucinatory to hard-boiled as she describes her meditative and investigative meanderings along the Pacific coast and in the desert during which she encounters a bizarrely communicative sign for the Dream Inn, scatterings of weirdly pristine candy wrappers, and strangers discussing Roberto Bola�o's 2666 and a saint saving imperiled children. Keenly sensitive to atmosphere within and without, Smith finds herself in the middle of the unexplained as she travels with cosmic spontaneity and an almost religious simplicity. She matches the verifiable with the inexplicable and remembers her life-saving childhood library and her cherished, then dying friend, the pioneering songwriter, producer, and critic Sandy Pearlman. Smith also chronicles with exquisite poignancy her last visits with her soul mate Sam Shepherd as she helps him complete his last book. Smith's reflections on a wrenching yet grace-filled year as the world in its dependable folly kept spinning is elegiac, vital, and magical.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Smith's large, loyal following will seek out this spellbinding memoir, just as they embraced Just Kids (2010) and M Train (2015).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)