Ms. Hen reviews Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith

Alfred A. Knopf

2019

Ms. Hen read this because she has read a couple of other books by Patti Smith and she genuinely liked them. She received this as a birthday gift from her hen-sister because she told her she wanted it.  Her birthday seems like a long time ago, even though it was only at the beginning of March. So much in the world has changed since then, and reading this book made Ms. Hen wonder what Patti would have to say about the situation we are in now.

This memoir is about the Year of the Monkey, 2016. Ms. Smith starts the book by writing about her friend Sandy Pearlman and how he was in a coma in January of that year. They were supposed to go to Santa Cruz and stay at a place called the Dream Inn, but instead she went by herself, and the Inn haunted her. She had conversations with the sign at the inn that told her to be aware of her dreams. This book is full of dreams and hopes and grief.

YEAR OF THE MONKEY is an easy book to read, but it’s difficult to follow. It reminds Ms. Hen a lot of M TRAIN, the memoir Ms. Smith wrote about coffee and traveling during her lecture tours and going on quests to find places that interested her. She’s obsessed with artists of all eras, and remembers everyone’s birthday obsessively. Ms. Hen admires this about her, but Ms. Hen is not a person who’s obsessed with artists, more of stories.

Ms. Hen remembers the year of the monkey, 2016. Some things in her life changed that year, and she remembers the feeling in the country that followed the election: the fear, the anticipation, the chaos, and the hope that things would change in the future. Ms. Smith writes about this eloquently in this book.

Ms. Hen thinks that Patti Smith lives on a different plane than most people. She’s not sure if it’s because Ms. Smith has spent so much time working on her art, or if she’s simply a strange person, and can’t help being how she is. Ms. Hen admires the way she views the world, and finds it inspirational that she does her own thing. Ms. Hen would like to try to see the world through Patti’s eyes for a time, the weird, beautiful world where everything is a marvel, and the possibilities are endless.